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Useful Mac Applications

2006

SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because
it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear,
friendly interface is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper's built-in
scheduler makes it trivial to back up automatically. And it runs beautifully
on both Intel and Power PC Macs!


Wed, 31 May 2006

Here is some (useful) information from recent seminars given by
Jim Mitchell at the MacGathering 2006 in Los Angeles on May 20, 2006.
I was only able to attend  Part 1 and if you have any questions
I will try to answer them.

Slide Presentation ... [ Click here ]

In the slides Jim gives his recommendations and a geek-factor rating.

-------------------------------------
Best Bang For Your Buck Toolbox   (all free)
-------------------------------------
    * Anacron : Jaguar & Panther | Tiger
    * Preferential Treatment
    * CarbonCopyCloner
    * iBackup
    * ClamXav
    * Yasu
    * Apple Disk Utitlity ( part of Mac OS X)


HINTS:
ANACRON: Runs Periodic maintenance scripts when it's most convenient for your system

PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT:  Good "guick fix" tool for troubleshooting an application that
keeps crashing.


CARBON COPY CLONER & iBACKUP for BACKUPS
----------------------------------------
(If you already have a  backup system that works for you stick with it
and ignore what follows in this section.

If you have a portable powerbook, ibook, macbook, macbookpro; the La Cie
Porsche Drive is small and has firewire/USB and we've tried them out.
There are other models too.
        http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/range.htm?id=10036


Jim's suggestion: is to have a backup disk that is 1.5 times the size of your computer
hard drive.
Partition it into two.
A) a little bigger than your hard drive
B) what is left over

Use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of your hard drive on the
first partition

Use iBackup to back up your User Folder andd System Preferences to the second partition.

Some of us use: SilverKeeper (free) and Restrospect (not free)


CLAMXAV - VIRUS DETECTION
is a good virus dectetor if you keep your virus definitions up to date - always.


YASU - TROUBLESHOOTING
for a quick fix (Yet Another System Utility)


DISK REPAIR
Free with Mac OS X:             Apple Disk Utility, Safe Boot
Tech Tool Pro, Disk Warrior:    non-free


Note:
FIXING PERMISSIONS USING DISK UTILITY
Whenever you are going to backup Fix Permissions before you clone/backup
Whenever you copy stuff to your hard drive, fix permissions.