Onyx?

[struggle4progress]

Supposedly a maintenance program for OSX. Comes with many warnings and disclaimers: Backup before you use me me cuz I might accidentally trash everything!!! and so on. Ran a bit of it today to see what I thought. It told me my start-up drive passed SMART but needs repair. Think that drive may run a bit hot but its not causing trouble at present. Anyway, started up from OSX install and ran repair. Repair found no problems. I think I should 86 Onyx in the circular file.

[Pierre.Suave]

1. I cant tell you how many times I get a call that starts out with...

I was trying to use Onyx and something bad happened...

Just dont use it.

What are you trying to do anyway?

[struggle4progress]

2. Eh, I regularly perform multiple backups and then try out programs to see if I like them

I have multiple backups of everything. There are old claims floating around that say you should perform regular maintenance on a Mac, and some recommend Onyx. My current thinking is that Leopard's launchd-handled maintenance scripts will handle much of the stuff, but I'm not adverse to trying software that (saY) checks disks and volumes or defrags, to see if I like what it does. There's plenty of stuff like that out there

Today I simply let Onyx check SMART status and the start-up volume. I wasn't impressed. I've deleted the program.

[Pierre.Suave]

3. Deleting it is a good idea

if you want to run just the built in Maintenance scripts, here is an automator action that does it on command.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/maintenance.html

[struggle4progress]

4. I think the maintenance scripts under Leopard don't require the machine to be left on

but run automatically later if the machine was off when the script was supposed to run, so they should be running without my intervention

But thanks for the link! I'll download the action in the hope that peeking at it gives me some more insight into Apple script

[Pierre.Suave]

5. It is a pretty cool little script

It comes with instructions to set it to run automatically if you want. I run it once a month, and it seems to keep things working smoothly.

[struggle4progress]

6. Thanks. I've downloaded it. I'll look it over when I get a chance.