My Mac Pro is about 4 years old and so far running well. I am very aware that every morning I press the button and she starts up, but I know this can change in the blink of an eye. Is there anything I should be doing to make sure the boot drive is still in good shape, such as occasionally AppleJack it or Disk Warrior maintenance, repair permissions etc… I have not noticed any loss of performance yet or any unusual behaviour.
Now, this is just second hand speculation, but it makes sense to me:
Many computer servicemen say to never shut your computer down if you can avoid it. It is much easier on a drive to be continually spinning and warm than to go through the movement and temperature changes associated with powering down/up.
I run “Verify Disk” and “Verify Disk Permissions” every few months. If there is an issue, then I get it fixed. Also, backup! External hard-drives are so cheap now there’s no real excuse for not doing so. I, for one, keep two backups of my internal drive. One goes to a safe deposit box, where I pick it up once a week and create a full backup. The other stays on my desk and runs Time Machine.
Well I like the bit about not shutting down Caleb, much easier to put to sleep.
I do back up using Time Machine onto another internal drive, so I’ve got that which is comforting, plus like you I do regular backups using SuperDuper to an external drive which is kept in a gun cabinet rawl bolted to the wall, so looks like I’m covered.
Using Disk Utility I did a Verify disk today and it found problems, so I booted from a backup and ran Repair. I now have to air blow it out, as it’s full of dust. Did that once with a G4 and it broke the power supply, don’t know how though.
My Mac’s all are running more than fine.
And you know what? I never ever do anything for maintenance, certainly not by third party software. Never did, by the way. I’ve managed studio’s with dozens of Macs, only repaired stuff when it was broken. TimeMachine’s taking care of the backups, and I’ve never had one breakdown on any of my Macs. Could be luck, but I never try to fix something that doesn’t need to be fixed. They only shut down at night at 05:00 and start up again one hour later. For me seems to work just fine.