Maintenance for your Mac - Who'd have thought?

I always wait for a scare...
I was having some scary sounding clicking noises come out of my Mac Book Pro that caused me to look into hard drive issues (I've had noisy dying Windows HDs before, so I checked there first). Now that I'm scared of HD or other such failures, I'm backing things up and trying to dig deeper for any other problems that I can diagnose from the operating system. I thought I'd blog a bit about what I'm learning about Mac maintenance in the process. This may only be relevant for Mac OS 10.4 users, as I have not yet upgraded to Tiger.

Repair Disks and Permissions
The first thing I tried was to run the Disk Utility. The Disk Utility is accessible by going to Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility. From here, you can click on your HD (mine is a 111.8 GB Fujitsu), then click on the First Aid tab. There are two activities you should do for your main HD for regular maintenance: Verify Disk, and Verify Permissions. If they're in the clear, you're good to move on skipping the next paragraph.

If you have problems surface from running Verify Disk, you cannot immediately click Repair Disk. The easiest way I learned of to repair this is to reboot into safe mode. To boot into safe mode, turn off your computer, then turn it on again and just after the Mac startup noise, press and hold the shift key until you see the screen with the Apple logo. By the time it gets to the login screen (some 10 minutes later in my case, with no indication of progress), it should have attempted a repair of your disk, and you can try running Verify Disk in the Disk Utility again to be sure that your repair was successful. Problems indicated from Verify Permissions are more easily corrected: you simply need to click Repair Permissions.

Defragment your disk
I always liked watching Windows' defrag utility when I was young... for the first few minutes, and then I'd go find a non-computer amusement. When I got a Mac I learned it's not really necessary to defrag. However, if your hard drive is very full or you do video editing defragging once in a while is a good idea. Although I've done a bit of editing in iMovie lately, I decided not to when I learned I'd have to install some third party software.

Manually run the periodic UNIX maintenance scripts
Several UNIX scripts run on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis in the background on your computer. If your computer is not on at the time they're scheduled for, they may not run as scheduled.
To run them, simply type sudo periodic daily weekly monthly in a terminal window and supply the root password. You will not receive any feedback, but the prompt will return

Backup your files
Don't wait for a scare. Back up your important files on an external hard drive, a few CDs or DVDs, or use the internet whether it's extra file space on your web host's server or dedicated backup space.

Find out more
I found this page especially useful when looking for things to do to properly maintain my Mac:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintainingmacosx.html