Onyx

I have heard OnyX talked about by lots of people and thought I would give it a spin.

What is Onyx?  According to their website, "OnyX is a multifunction utility that enables you to verify the startup disk and the structure of its system files, to run miscellaneous maintenance and cleaning tasks, to configure parameters in Finder, Dock and some of the Apple-own applications, to delete caches, to remove certain problematic folders and files, to rebuild various databases and indexes and more."

My luck with my Mac mini's have been great so far.  I have not run into any problems where I think I need this tool yet, but you never know.

I installed Onyx 2.0.6 on Leopard and Onyx 2.1.4 on Snow Leopard.  As with most Mac apps, the install was a breeze.  On Leopard, you need to execute the OnyX.pkg and on Snow Leopard, you just had to drap the app to the Applications Folder.

Once you start Onyx, it immediately asks you if you want to check the S.M.A.R.T status of your disk.  Click Continue.

Click Continue to Verifying startup volume.

As I was busy clicking away and not reading carefully, I noticed that several of my apps were being shutdown.  The apps included VMware Fusion, iTunes, Evernote, Firefox and Chrome.  I am glad to say I have not noticed any adverse effects as a result.  Once the verification is complete, you will see a Volume verified message.  Click OK.

You will now be presented with the OnyX main menu.  You could have arrived here quicker by skipping the S.M.A.R.T. check.

As I have not had any problems as of late, I have not explicitly run any maintenance.  I figured I might as well run Repair Permissions.  Note you can also do this by using Disk Utility.

As you can see in the 2 images below, I can see that on my Leopard machine, daily maintenance has not been run as of late and weekly and monthly has not run at all.

On my Snow Leopard machine, the maintenance dates are more current.  The difference is obvious to me as I keep my Snow Leopard machine running all the time and the maintenance scripts are run in the early hours of the morning.  My Leopard machine is shutdown every night and therefor the scripts are not run unless I do so explicitly.

There are lots of other utilities for maintaining your Mac.  Should I run into weird problems, I could see using this utility to try and fix them.  However at this time, I see no reason to run any of these.  I will certainly poke around some more.