Maintaining Your Mac a Joe on Tech Guide
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Maintaining Your Mac A Joe On Tech Guide Joe Kissell This book is for sale at http://leanpub.com/mym-joeontech This version was published on 2016-09-20 ISBN 978-0-9785740-5-5 This is a Leanpub book. Leanpub empowers authors and publishers with the Lean Publishing process. Lean Publishing is the act of publishing an in-progress ebook using lightweight tools and many iterations to get reader feedback, pivot until you have the right book and build traction once you do. © 2015 - 2016 alt concepts inc. Tweet This Book! Please help Joe Kissell by spreading the word about this book on Twitter! The suggested hashtag for this book is #JoeOnTech. Find out what other people are saying about the book by clicking on this link to search for this hashtag on Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=#JoeOnTech Contents Read Me First ........................................... 1 Updates ............................................. 1 Basics .............................................. 1 What’s New in Version 1.2 .................................. 2 A Note to Readers ......................................... 3 Introduction ............................................ 4 Quick Start ............................................. 6 Chapter 1 Start on the Right Foot ................................ 7 Install the Latest Version of macOS .............................. 7 Turn On Automatic App Store Updates ............................ 8 Update Third-Party Software ................................. 11 Clean Out Accumulated Cruft ................................ 13 Turn Off Unneeded Login Items ............................... 18 Set Up a Backup System .................................... 19 Test Your Hardware ...................................... 21 Run Disk Utility ........................................ 23 Use a Surge Protector or UPS ................................. 25 Update Weak Passwords .................................... 26 Use Optimized Storage in Sierra ............................... 28 Consider a Maintenance Utility (or Two) ........................... 29 Read Me First Welcome to Maintaining Your Mac: A Joe On Tech Guide, version 1.2, published in September 2016 by alt concepts inc. This book was written by Joe Kissell and edited by Caroline Rose. Macs, like all machines, are prone to break down eventually—in either a physical sense (a component going bad) or a logical sense (files becoming corrupted, apps misbehaving). You can reduce the risk of such problems, and minimize the damage when they do occur, with a regular maintenance regimen. This book contains simple steps you can take to keep your Mac humming. Copyright © 2016, alt concepts inc. All rights reserved. Updates Minor updates to the electronic versions of this book will be free, and major updates will be available at a discount to anyone who purchased a previous version. Check for updates using the link at the top of the About This Book chapter. Basics Here are a few basic concepts that will help you read this book: • Links: All blue text in this ebook is hot, meaning you can click (or tap) it, just like a link on the web. When you follow a link to a different part of the ebook, you can return quickly to where you were by using your ebook reader’s “back” feature. For example, in iBooks in iOS, tap the “Back to” link in the lower-left corner of the screen, or in Preview on a Mac, choose Go → Back or press -[. Many of the URLs are shortened (like alt.cc/abc) to make them more compact and easier to type, especially for anyone reading this book on paper. These short URLs automatically redirect you to the original target destination. • Menus and preferences: Where I tell you to choose a menu command, I use an abbreviated format. For example, “Choose File → New Folder” means “Choose New Folder from the File menu.”Similarly, I use the → notation for navigating to panes, tabs, and other views, especially in Preferences windows: “Go to System Preferences → Security & Privacy → General.” • Finding System Preferences: I sometimes refer to settings in System Preferences that you may want to adjust. To open System Preferences, click its icon in the Dock or choose Apple → System Preferences. When the System Preferences window opens, click the icon of the pane whose settings you want to adjust. Read Me First 2 • Path syntax: This book occasionally uses a path to show the location of a file or folder in your file system. For example, the path to the Terminal utility in the Applications folder’s Utilities subfolder is /Applications/Utilities/Terminal. The slash at the start of the path tells you to begin at the top level of the disk. Some paths begin with ∼ (tilde), which is a shortcut for the current user’s home directory; for example, if my username is joe, my Documents folder is at ∼/Documents, which is another way of saying /Users/joe/Documents. Note: If you’re running 10.12 Sierra or later, macOS gives you the option to move your Desktop and Documents folders to iCloud Drive. (You can enable or disable this in System Prefer- ences → iCloud by clicking the Options button next to iCloud Drive and selecting or deselecting Desktop & Documents Folders.) When this feature is enabled, ∼/Documents no longer points to /Users/your-username/Documents but rather to iCloud Drive/Documents. • User Library: The user’s Library folder (∼/Library) is normally hidden. To see it in the Finder, hold down the Option key and choose Go → Library. From there you can navigate to any subfolder of ∼/Library. • Disks, drives, and volumes: When I use the term disk, I’m referring generically to a data storage device, which could be a hard drive, an SSD (solid-state drive) or other solid-state storage, or a Fusion drive (which combines a hard drive with solid-state storage). Each disk (of whatever sort) contains one or more volumes, which appear in your Finder as disks. Your startup volume is the one your Mac boots from—named Macintosh HD by default. • macOS vs. OS X: Apple called its desktop operating system “Mac OS X” from 10.0 Cheetah through 10.7 Lion; it was “OS X” from 10.8 Mountain Lion through 10.11 El Capitan; and as of 10.12 Sierra, Apple’s term is “macOS.” For simplicity, I mostly stick with “macOS” in this book, except when referring to specific older versions. What’s New in Version 1.2 This book is based on an earlier title of mine called Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac, which was last updated in 2012 and has now been retired. With the kind permission and cooperation of the folks at Take Control Books, I “adopted” that book in 2015 and gave it a new title, a new look and feel, and totally updated content. Version 1.2 is a minor update, mainly to include information on features in Sierra. The most significant changes are: • Added the topic Use Optimized Storage in Sierra • Added mentions of Hazel and Sierra’s Optimized Storage to Empty Your Trash • Updated the Repair Permissions discussion to make it more apparent that this capability disappeared starting with El Capitan A Note to Readers Thank you for purchasing this book. If you find it helpful, you’re sure to enjoy the articles, videos, and other resources at Joe On Tech (joeontech.net). Joe On Tech is all about improving your relationship with technology. As such, the site won’t bombard you with ads and other annoyances. You’ll just find quality information, supported mainly by the sales of books like this one. This book is one of four I’ve written that involve keeping your Mac healthy and fit. Inevitably, they all overlap somewhat, but they have different emphases: • This book focuses on preventive maintenance: avoiding future problems, reducing clutter, making your Mac easier to use, and monitoring its ongoing health. • Speeding Up Your Mac (alt.cc/suym) goes into great detail about ways to increase your Mac’s performance, returning it to (or even surpassing) the speed it had when it was brand new. This includes finding and taming rogue processes, improving disk and CPU responsiveness, installing hardware upgrades, optimizing your wireless network, and many other tasks that contribute to overall speed. • Troubleshooting Your Mac (alt.cc/tym) is about solving problems that prevent your Mac from operating properly. It includes basic troubleshooting procedures, ready-made solutions to common complaints, and techniques that can help you diagnose and treat issues the book doesn’t cover specifically. • Backing Up Your Mac (alt.cc/buym) provides detailed guidance on protecting your Mac’s data against any potential catastrophe, from theft and fires to simple user error. You’ll learn not only how to keep your data safe but also, crucially, how to recover all your data if and when disaster strikes. I’d like to let you know about future updates to this book, new Joe On Tech guides, and other useful, relevant information. If you haven’t already done so, please sign up for joeMail (alt.cc/joemail), my free, low-volume, no-spam mailing list. You can also follow @joeontech on Twitter (twit- ter.com/joeontech). And, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to contact me using the form at joeontech.net/contact. I look forward to hearing from you. Joe Kissell San Diego, California September 2016 Introduction Back in the early 2000s, I went to the dentist for the first time in many years. After skipping dental visits for far too long, I felt increasingly reluctant to schedule an appointment. I could just hear the dentist chiding me, “Ah, I can see you haven’t had your teeth cleaned properly in five years. For shame!” The more time passed, the worse my embarrassment grew, and finally it took actual pain and a visible hole in a tooth to overcome it. So I was disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that I had several cavities and needed a root canal. The dentist was kind and understanding but nevertheless pointed out repeatedly that this visit might have been much less painful (and less expensive) had I flossed every day and gone for my semiannual checkups as I knew I should have.