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Huntn

Huntn

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Cleaning Your Computer Utilities
Anyone use them? Any reason not to use them? I see some people call programs like this malware. I used Clean Your Mac X to clean off about a Gig od space off my wife’s MacBook Air because when I tried to install Big Sur, it told me I needed 30Gb of space.

Regarding CleanYourMacX it is a trial version and they want a subscription, No thank you.
 
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From what I heard about these programs is that they’re mostly scams, especially Clean Your Mac X. I have never used it but I hear it’s particularly difficult to uninstall it which is pretty unacceptable and smells of something shady.
 
Runs For Fun said:
From what I heard about these programs is that they’re mostly scams, especially Clean Your Mac X. I have never used it but I hear it’s particularly difficult to uninstall it which is pretty unacceptable and smells of something shady.
Click to expand...
Well, CYMX removed quit a bit of stuff, looking at the hard drive, and was easy to uninstall. It has an uninstall program module (for any program on your computer) and I used that to select it as a program and it removed itself. My primary issue with this was it was a trial and they like so many others now want you to rent their software, thanks but no thanks if I can avoid that. :unsure:

I’m also looking at Onyx a free program.
 
Thomas Veil said:
I’ve used Onyx in the past to fix stability issues on my older iMac. I don’t think it “cleans up” much though, except for clearing some caches.

Never had a problem with it. Scamware it’s not.
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My impression is the MacOS definitely needs something for removing the remnants of removed programs. Windows has this.
 
Thomas Veil said:
I’ve used Onyx in the past to fix stability issues on my older iMac. I don’t think it “cleans up” much though, except for clearing some caches.

Never had a problem with it. Scamware it’s not.
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Onyx is probably the only one that I would trust. That's like the only one I've heard good things about and have used it a few times.
 
I've never used any of these utilities. But, every few years, I work up the courage to do a clean macOS install, copying just data from a cloned backup and then re-installing all my apps from scratch. It usually takes a few days to get everything back the way I need it, but it's like moving from one home to another — I get rid of a lot. This time around, I'm going to wait until I replace my Intel iMac with an iMac M (or Mac mini M, if Apple releases one with a faster processor).
 
I've gotten computer restores down to a near exact science. I use my Documents folder for all my important files that I really don't want to lose. Everything in this document folder is backed up to OneDrive, and for extra safety, copied over to an external drive. If I ever feel the need to wipe my OS, and start fresh, all I need to do is copy the Documents folder from the external drive, or download off OneDrive. The only thing left from that point is installing all my applications, download BitWarden, and log back in to all my websites, which usually only takes me about an hour or so to do.
 
Renzatic said:
I've gotten computer restores down to a near exact science. I use my Documents folder for all my important files that I really don't want to lose. Everything in this document folder is backed up to OneDrive, and for extra safety, copied over to an external drive. If I ever feel the need to wipe my OS, and start fresh, all I need to do is copy the Documents folder from the external drive, or download off OneDrive. The only thing left from that point is installing all my applications, download BitWarden, and log back in to all my websites, which usually only takes me about an hour or so to do.
Click to expand...
I'm still rocking a 1TB and a 2TB Time Capsule each ethernet connected to a mesh router located in opposite corners of the house. This way I can bypass the wifi bottleneck of the old Time Capsule routers and get decent backup and recovery speeds. But I'll say I only reinstall my mac when I get a new machine. Since using a TC/Mac (almost 10 years) I've only had one data loss event and it was an MS permission issue.
 
AppCleaner from FreeMacSoft. Drag and drop an application onto it and it finds most of the ancillary files scattered about the drive. Also PkgUninstaller from CoreCode; paid, but it reads the package manifest from pkg-installed apps and uninstalls them.
 
I've used OnyX in the past, but not the last two or three years. Always felt that it was good and reliable and that it wasn't going to destroy my machine.
 
Over at MRs someone asked if anyone used arrays (Hard drive backups). I said no. Instead I have 3 external 1TB drives. One acts as a Time Machine backup to my MBP, and the 2 others store important data mirroring each other. I like my setup, although it involves 3 external hard drives, it is unlikely that 2 drives would simo fail. I need to look at what exactly the advantage of an array is over what I’m doing. This is besides my online iDrive backup.

So why configure an array?

Multiple hard drives working together: All about RAID setups

Stevey, admittedly confused regarding the benefits of RAID arrays, asked the Answer Line forum to explain these hard-drive groups.
www.pcworld.com www.pcworld.com

RAID 1​

Turn two 1TB drives into a RAID 1 array, and you get the capacity and speed of a single 1TB drive. So what’s the point? Protection.

In a RAID 1 array, the two drives mirror each other, so that they both contain the exact same data. If one drive fails, the other keeps working. No files are lost, and there’s no downtime.
 
Huntn said:
Over at MRs someone asked if anyone used arrays (Hard drive backups). I said no. Instead I have 3 external 1TB drives. One acts as a Time Machine backup to my MBP, and the 2 others store important data mirroring each other. I like my setup, although it involves 3 external hard drives, it is unlikely that 2 drives would simo fail. I need to look at what exactly the advantage of an array is over what I’m doing. This is besides my online iDrive backup.

So why configure an array?

Multiple hard drives working together: All about RAID setups

Stevey, admittedly confused regarding the benefits of RAID arrays, asked the Answer Line forum to explain these hard-drive groups.
www.pcworld.com www.pcworld.com

RAID 1​

Turn two 1TB drives into a RAID 1 array, and you get the capacity and speed of a single 1TB drive. So what’s the point? Protection.

In a RAID 1 array, the two drives mirror each other, so that they both contain the exact same data. If one drive fails, the other keeps working. No files are lost, and there’s no downtime.
Click to expand...
Time capsule x2 opposite corners of the home, each on surge protected outlets.
 
P_X said:
Time capsule x2 opposite corners of the home, each on surge protected outlets.
Click to expand...
Is this an array, and 2 external drives? Is there an advantage of an “array” to what I am doing?
 
Huntn said:
Is this an array, and 2 external drives? Is there an advantage of an “array” to what I am doing?
Click to expand...

If you are using 2 mirrored drives, even if you mirror them manually somehow, that is a drive array in my book. RAID 1 is a specific type of mirrored array, one that’s generally easier to manage as the mirroring is done at the storage level for you, and the drive system can remain online and rebuild one drive from the other once replaced for you.
 
Huntn said:
Is there an advantage of an “array” to what I am doing?
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Well, I would go with “If you have to ask, the answer is no.” in this case.

I’d rather have two separate backup drives than two in one mirrored RAID array. Anything written to that array would end up on both drives, including undesired writes. For example, many years ago I had an external enclosure setup as RAID 1 storage, something went wrong (not my fault!) and the partition table got nuked. The drives were both physically fully functional and contained bit for bit identical data. Ergo, no access to my data. Luckily I could recover the partition table using TestDisk so I didn’t have to restore everything from a backup.

Huntn said:
In a RAID 1 array, the two drives mirror each other, so that they both contain the exact same data. If one drive fails, the other keeps working. No files are lost, and there’s no downtime.
Click to expand...
This right here. Figure out if “no downtime” is appealing. If it is storage connected to your computer with files you are actively working with, for example, then no downtime might be of value.
 

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