Real World Mac Maintenance and Backups

3. Perform Weekly Tasks

Your daily maintenance tasks are minor—and perhaps they even happen automatically. Once a week, however, you should set aside time for some more in-depth housekeeping. Depending on your work habits and system specifications, these weekly tasks might take 15 minutes or they might take a couple of hours. If you find that you can’t finish them all conveniently in one sitting, feel free to stagger them—one each day of the week, for example—as long as any given task occurs about once every week.

Clean Up Your Desktop

I want to ask you a personal question. How many icons—not counting hard disks, network volumes, and removable media—are sitting on your Desktop right now? (My answer: 11, though I usually try to keep it closer ...