By default these run between 3:15 and 5:30 in the morning. Your Mac is a UNIX-based system and as such it runs scheduled maintenance scripts to clean up logs and temporary files. More on this can be found on Apple’s support page. It’s not often that you need to run Repair Disk on your startup disk, but it can help if you’re experiencing major issues. Repair Disk is most often done when a drive becomes unresponsive or data seems corrupted. Repair Disk can fix any drive that is attached to your machine, but to run it on your startup disk you’ll need to boot into Recovery Mode or boot to an external install of OSX and run the command from there. Just as with permissions you need to verify the disk first and if there are issues present you can repair it.

If the problems with your Mac go beyond simple permissions issues, you may need to repair the disk. This will get OS X going on realigning the permissions of system and application files so they run smoother and more reliably. If there are any issues in the history window like those seen in the example above, you would then click Repair Disk Permissions.

From here, select the drive that OS X is installed on, then click Verify Disk Permissions. To do this go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility. The first step is to verify disk permissions to see if it’s even worth repairing them. If permissions get out of whack you can experience issues with logging in, email, printing, or applications loading. These are basically settings that tell the operating system what users and application have access to each file. Every file on your Mac has a set of permissions attached to it. Verify and Repair Permissionsīefore going any farther, it’s probably a good idea to mention what exactly disk permissions are. You won’t hurt anything by running these actions, so if you’re experiencing any issues give them a try first. The 5 tips outlined below can be done whenever your Mac is starting to run slower or if random issues start to pop up. Left to its own devices Apple’s operating system will keep itself pretty clean and issue-free, but even with this there are times that you need to intervene to do some good old-fashioned manual maintenance. One of the great things about OS X is that it basically runs itself.

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