Maintaining Your Macintosh - The Long Version

Maintaining Your Macintosh - Basic Principles

1. Every important item on your computer must have a means of being restored.
2. Restore your computer with as little fuss as possible.
3. Always have the ability to undo what you are about to do to your computer setup.
4. Understand how your computer works to quickly locate the source of trouble.

To be able to meet the requirements of rule #1, there are several things to consider: your applications, your data, and your settings. Let's face it, in order to reinstall software, it really helps to own it. Do not pirate software. You need some type of backup system for the data you create. You also need to backup that system folder to copy back in preferences and other files that get "hosed".

Rule #2 means that one needs to have the system setup with some redundancy. At the least you should have a second hard drive or removable storage device to back up your system. Having a duplicate system folder on an external hard drive is what I consider a minimal requirement if one owns a Macintosh. For 200-300 dollars, one will save hours of aggravation. And you can use this hard drive to connect to a friends machine as well. Very helpful if you need that 10 Meg download!

Rule #3 is analogous to "never make the patient worse". If you are about to make a major modification to a computer. Make certain everything is backed up in such a way that you can restore the system to the original state if something goes wrong. You are giving yourself a large "Undo" option by doing this.

Rule #4 is something that you will gain over time. Like a scientist, systematically change one thing (variable) at a time to isolate a problem. If you install seven fixes at once, how will you ever know what caused and then fixed the problem? When you get the experience, you can get away with skipping steps, but do not do it as a novice.
When you set up that external hard drive, read the instructions completely concerning termination and SCSI ID's. These instructions are usually very short and you might as well make certain you are doing it right. The beauty is that SCSI on PC's and Macs are essentially the same, so a PC guru should even be able to help you here.

The key to keeping your computer happy is backups. If you lost a certain file and you would cry, make a backup. If you lost a certain file and you would die, make at least three. Really, no kidding. It's really fun when your floppy drive goes out of alignment and eats your disk. Then you try your backup and it gets eaten too. Having that third copy to take to another machine doesn't sound so paranoid, does it?

I remember the day someone came to me with a disk that no longer functioned containing a doctoral dissertation. No backups were ever made. Hello! At least a year's worth of work on one disk made of the similar material in cassette tapes that get destroyed so easily. I recovered the files with Norton Utilities and proceded to put copies on two additional disks. Totally amazing insanity. Yet this type of thing has happened several times. There have also been a number of times that I have been unable to recover important files. BACK UP IMPORTANT DATA!