Best Tool For Mac Maintenance

There’s something of a misconception when it comes to the Mac. While powerful tools like Photoshop or Final Cut Pro certainly have price tags commensurate with their robust feature sets, many of the greatest Mac apps won’t cost you anything more than the time they take to download them.

A quick note before we begin. Apple has changed its security settings in macOS, so you’ll need to allow your system to open a couple of these apps. A dialogue box may pop up telling you a certain app 'is an application downloaded from the Internet. Are you sure you want to open it?' Click Open to proceed with the installation.

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Best Tool For Mac Maintenance

You have a Mac, or maybe you're responsible for taking care of them at your business. You need an toolkit of apps that help you get out of trouble when your Mac's not working right. Maybe a hard drive needs rebuilding or recovery, the memory needs testing, you're desperate to un-delete files, you need to access to deeper system maintenance, or you simply want to better clean out the.

I have a MacBook Pro (Non-Retina) and wish to get a maintenance utility. Can anyone recommend any good apps?

Best Tool For Mac Maintenance
  1. I'm a big fan of Clix from Rixstep. It is a great way to get comfortable using the Unix command line to access all of the hidden settings on your Mac that other apps provide in a GUI. The functionality is already there and you can get to all of it at the command line. Plus, the various .clix files are chocked full of scripts that all you to clean log files, purge caches, clean your swap file, purge unneeded language files. Give it a try - it's free!
    http://rixstep.com/4/0/clix/

  2. Basically most of the tools you will ever need are already on your Mac

    Disk Utility to repair permissions and Verify/Repair the disk.
    http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1452
    http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1782

    Repairing permissions should be done somewhat regularly for example before installing a major OS X or Security Update. Personally I like to run Verify Disk at least once a year to make sure the file system is all fine. On a portable Mac with a mechanical disk (non SSD) you should probably run it more often to detect early failures of the file system or disk.

    The two other features of the Mac one should know about are Safe Boot and Recovery Mode.
    Safe Boot is helpful whenever you encounter a problem that doesn't get solved by repairing permissions, removing preferences files, re-installing the latest OS X combo update and such.
    Recovery Mode allows you to repair the disk which cannot be done while running/being booted from the OS X installation of the target disk.
    http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4718
    http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1564

    The only other tools I personally like to have at hand are Maintenance Cocktail, which can perform and automate the most important maintenance and troubleshooting tasks.
    http://www.maintain.se/cocktail

    DiskWarrior which can repair file system issues beyond the capabilities of Disk Utility
    http://www.alsoft.com/diskwarrior/

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    a data recovery tool of your choice and preference, mine being
    Prosoft Data Rescue, easy to use for basic recovery
    http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

    R-Studio for Mac, more for advanced users but can also do all the advanced stuff including recovery e.g. from non-mountable disk images, sparse bundle images (e.g. Time Machine) and such.
    http://www.r-tt.com/data_recovery_macintosh/

    • Awesome comment thanks for all the info.

    • Wow this is a awesome list of programs and I'm sure I could Make Use Of at least a few. Thanks for sharing.

  3. Onyx from http://www.titanium.free.fr

  4. Also CCleaner for mac - http://www.piriform.com/mac/ccleaner.
    This is a great cross platform App.

  5. I use Clean my mac 2 - http://macpaw.com/cleanmymac
    Try for free.

  6. 'And of course, you need an antivirus (I like the free Sophos best, but there are others).'
    No, no, no you do not. Essentially all mac anti virus programs cause and do not solve problems. There are literally no mac viruses in the wild.

    Of the programs listed in the utilities section of the above link, the vast majority should be avoided like the plague, especially programs that allow you to access functions normally closed off from the user. Macs come with a built in backup option in time machine.

    The only apps you really should use are apps that serve a specific nonOS function, like audio and image editing and playing, games, toys, etc. Look at that list. 1password? You mean kinda like.. keychain access? Most of the programs listed there literally do exactly the same thing as a built in utility in Mac OSX. But they add ads and trackers! Yaaay!

    • You make a good point. I don't use 'Antivirus Software' on my Mac.

    • The reason why people look for additional utilities is exactly to do things that are not doable/easily done with OS X. There are several third party utilities listed that are extremely valuable and most of them do not contain any trackers or ads. Have you even tried any of them? 1Password has absolutely nothing to do with the keychain, for example.

      To reply to the original question, for pure maintenance my favorite is Onyx. Simple, powerful and free.

    • 1passwords primary function is LITERALLY EXACTLY what keychain access is. So, ya know, yeah.. It also adds some functionality like storing a PLAIN TEXT ENTRY of credit card numbers. Really? Really? My comment stands, and is correct.

    • I agree with Joshua. 1Password does what Keychain Access does but with more features. Old mac laptops. I checked out Onyx and it seems to do a great job.

  7. I would just like to add that CCleaner (which is listed under 'Browsing Aids' on the page referenced by Susendeep D) is becoming a very capable maintenance tool for OS X.

  8. In addition to the list mentioned by Susendeep, there's Alsoft's Disk Warrior (for rebuilding corrupt discs), Shirt Pocket's SuperDuper (for copying entire drives or imaging) and iDefrag from Coriolis System (defrags the disc, although this shouldn't be necessary for the vast majority of Macs for a variety of reasons). Prosoft Engineering also make some excellent recovery packages, but they're really only needed when your hard drive has suffered a very serious failure, and take a long time to complete their task, so I'm not sure whether or not they count as 'maintenance'. And of course, you need an antivirus (I like the free Sophos best, but there are others).

    • Thanks for this great list of tools. I'm sure I'll need DiskWarrior some day. (I use a ton of hard disks and flash drives).

  9. You can find some good maintenance programs for your Mac as picked by Makeuseof [see under Utilities section] -

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You'll rarely see how one piece of software can achieve so much — protecting your Mac from virus and malware, cleaning Mac disk drive, optimizing Mac startup times, and others. Obviously, IObit wants to position the app as a one-stop maintenance tool for a Mac. Mac Cleaning Software - Detox My Mac. Price: 24.95$ Detox My Mac is basically the Mac software cleaner. It is designed to clean up junk stored in the storage space on the Mac and makes the memory space free. There is a free trial of Detox My Mac which allows you to scan and remove logs and trashes like user logs, trash bin, etc.