How to Keep Mac OS X Mavricks optimized?

Apple's OS X Mavericks(10.9) is now available at Mac App store. If Mac uses have minimum requirement like you are running Mountain Lion then you can download Mavricks. There are many new applications e.g- Maps and iBooks, redesigned system apps, and new energy - saving technologies like App Nap and Safari Power Saver etc. Mavricks OS X has the great ability to manage less power consumption.

Some advanced/new features of Mavricks OS X:-

Finder-

In Mavericks, there is a new character popover to access special character. You can also access the old-style Special Characters window by clicking the icon next to the search field. You can also access old version from here- File > Revert To > Browse All Versions. This new updated finder will allow you to open a new tab in Finder with ⌘T. You can move between open tabs with ⌃⇧⇥ and ⌃⇥.

iBook-

This application is very helpful for those who love reading. You can import books from iTunes in this iBook Apps and read them.

Notification Center -

It will show you a new battery notification for low power, users can see the contact photos for Messages from Banner notifications. New message button is added on the top of the notification centre, when you click, it will open a small compose box similar to the Tweet and Facebook. widgets.

Safari:- Safari’s AutoFill settings have a new option for adding and managing credit card information. There are new option in Preferences > Advanced lets Safari stop Internet plugins to save power. Whenever you would open safari 7, you will see the top sites(google, facebook, twitter etc.) on that page.

Maps:- If you are planning to trip through your Mac then it helps you to show directions automatically when you will be on road. You can look up directions on your Mac and send them to all your iOS devices.

Calender:- This apps has new look in Mavricks OS X. You can manage your time easily with this tool, this apps will show you the address location when you do start typing during event editing process.

iCloud chain:- This apps helps you to keep remember website user names and passwords on the Mac and iOS devices you’ve added and always update them. It allows protection for them with robust 256-bit AES encryption. You can also keep credit card information with this application.

Tag:- This app helps you to organize and find your files. You can tag the files which is important to any single keyword.

New features will definitely helps you to do your work easily, but there are some third party tools which help to keep your Mac optimized and smooth in performance. Stellar Drive Defrag is one of the famous tools to defrag your Mac and increase it's performance. With the passage of time, your Mac becomes slow because of fragmented data scatters over Mac disk. However, new OS X 10.9 has great power to minimize fragmentation with some limitations.

Defrag tool of Stellar is a very good option to defrag OS X Mavricks easily. Just go through it and stay away from worries of slow Mac.

How to get rid of badly fragmented Mac drive

Fragmentation in Mac:- 
 

In general words, file means a single entity which we open, work and close. As an example we can consider a file like a book which has several pages, each page remains in a logical order to read it properly. In technical words, a file is a bunch of small pieces of data which is kept in sequential order over Mac disk. Your system keeps the track of individual piece of data to access it fastly. With the passage of time, these files gets divided and it is being kept in scattered way over Mac disk, which is called fragmented data. Files can become "fragmented" over time as they are changed and saved. 

Why fragmentation happens? 

Fragmentation happens because files on the disk are constantly changing; being created, deleted, grown, or shrunk in size. For example, we have created three files: file1, file2 and file3

At present these files are organised into contigious memory in above added image.

Now we delete file2 lets see the situation :-

You can see the free space(two empty sectors) in above image.

Now, we'll create a new file, file 4, which is four sectors long.

File4 is splitted into two fragments ,two sectors in part "(a)" and two sectors in part "(b)". When Mac drive gets full of these kind of fragmented data, it is called badly fragmented drive. When you access(click) any fragmented files, Mac OS puts extra efforts to search over whole disk and it takes too much time. Due to this reason your Mac becomes slow. Defragmentation is the cure of fragmented volume and it helps to improve your Mac performance.

"The process of collecting each file fragments and keeping them back together in logical order is known as optimization or defragmentation"

This process helps to arrange all pieces of files in logical order. However, Apple says that it's new file system HFS+ is able to defrag files of upto 20 MB file size and Mac OS Extended formatting (HFS Plus) avoids reusing space from deleted files as much as possible. In case of large files you have to buy some defragmenter for Mac. 

Do we need to optimize Mac? 

Defragmenting your hard drive can make a real sense and significant difference to your systems performance.

SSD- If you are using SSD then you do not need to defrag it because there is no movement, and there's actually no practical advantage to sectors which is being logically adjacent.

HDD- In case of HDD, you need to defrag your Mac because there is movement and each data remains in sectors which is logically arrenged.

Sometimes fragmentation occurs by continually appending data to existing files, many applications simply rewrite the entire file each time.

There are many Mac disk defragmenter available in market like iDefrag, Drive Genius etc.. Stellar Drive Defrag is a versatile option to defrag Mac safely and it is fast, efficient defrag tool that ensures your system is always running at its optimum performanceIt's free version helps to see how badly your Mac disk fragmented. 2.5 version of this tool has several new features like email notification, temperature bar etc.

Features of Stellar Drive Defrag tool:-

1.It performs complete defragmentation to your entire volume by dragging the files into contiguous memory.

2. It defrags the metadata files in a Mac volume, clubs together the scattered free spaces in a volume.

3. This tool creates a bootable DVD, which is used to defrag the boot volume and also to start your non-booting Mac system.

4. It helps to gather all free space into a contiguous block.

5. Email notification helps you to notify the completion of defrag process

6. It includes temperature bar to keep an eye to the fluctuations of Mac drive temperature.

Conclusion: If you constantly increase and decrease your Mac hard drive size with lots of little files, you love to video editing, photoshop regularly, leave your machine running all night and you are facing slow Mac then you must get Stellar Drive Defrag to defrag drive Mac. It works awesome and ia a very reliable tool. I would like to say, just download it's demo version, scan your entire Mac and check the status of your hard drive. If it is badly fragmented just spend only $ 39 bucks and remove fragmented data to keep Mac optimized.

An Efficient way to handle Mac fragmentation

One of my friends used to work with Mac OS X – 10.4 Tiger. Over a period of time, his Mac starting performing slow. Applications began to take more than usual time to open. He shared his problem with me. As I am not an expert so, started searching online for some ways to improve performance of Mac.

During my investigation, I got some prominent reasons for sluggish behavior of Mac and one of them is Fragmentation. With the passage of time we delete, create so many files , which creates spaces in Mac hard drive and starting to keep data into small pieces, called fragmentation. I would like to discuss in detail so that you could understand the facts of fragmentation.

When you save files(e.g, ten files) on Mac and they all take continuous positions on the hard drive, and out of these ten, you delete the fifth-one. After that, save a new file, this new file takes the space freed by the fifth-one. But, What will happen if the size of this new file is larger than deleted one. New file will be divided into chunks and one of which occupies the position freed by the deleted one and another parts will be kept in different memory locations. In this case, the Operating System has to create a link to maintain the linking among these parts of files.

Since, data has not been placed in contiguous memory location thus, OS will take much time to access those data. We can overcome this issue by using an efficient third-party Mac defragmentation software. Later version of Mac OS (after Mac OS X 10.4) have been introduced with new file system called HFS+, which can decrease the chances of fragmentation and handle fragmentaed files upto 20 MB in size.

Whereas, third-party defrag utilities help to keep all the scattered fragments of data together in contiguous memory location. You can get back performance of your Mac. I have suggested my friend to use Stellar Drive Defrag , I went through various sites, blogs, articles, etc and found this software as the best one. He has follow my suggestion and get his Mac performance as a rocket speed.

You can defrag your whole Mac or any selected volume in just a single click. You can optimize the free space of your Mac hard drive. Every information has been written very nicely in the user manual of this tool. I and my friend found it very easy to use and full of useful features.

Which is better for managing Mac partition- Disk Utility or Third party tool?

Disk Utility is an all in one utility of Mac OS X, which allows you to resolve all disk related issues. Mac users can perform formatting, partitioning, repairing and some maintenance on disks including SSDs, flash drives, and disk images etc. With the passage of time, various installations, un-installations, upgrades can change the permissions of various files. Disk utility helps you to repair the permission of certain files. To do this, click on a disk and then select the “First Aid” tab, from here you can choose “Verify Disk Permissions”. If permissions problems are found, you must select “Repair Disk Permissions”.

How to resize Mac partition with Disk Utility:-

If your Mac partitions are encrypted or non journalled then you cannot resize them. You can turn it on by selecting a particular partition and enable journaling icon in the toolbar. Open the Disk Utility Applications/Utilities folder, select the drive and click to partition tab, Disk Utility will do a Verify Disk on the partition being resized.

But, the interface of Disk Utility is not user friendly so, there are many third party tools which offer more easy-to-use interface to resolve Mac disk related issues.

Reliable tool to partition your Mac drive- Stellar Partition Manager

Many Mac users do not even partition their Mac hard drive and they keep their data along with the system files.

Do you know why it is not safe?

If your Mac is unable to boot due to some reason then you may need to reinstall your Mac OS X and you will lose all your important data. On other hand, if your Mac OS X has several partitions, any issue with boot volume does not affect your data at all. Stellar Partition Manager can easily resolve partitioning related issues like creation of a new one, formatting, deletion, resizing hide/reveal a partition. No matter, on which version of Mac OS X you are working.

Add a Volume;-

Using this application you can easily create a new volume by using available free space. When you run Stellar Partition Manager and click to the next button on its home screen, in left panel just select the hard drive on which you want to create new partition and click Add button in the toolbar. specify a name, move the slider to set a size, and click OK button, After that, click Start button in the toolbar, a warning message pops up. Click continue and you will see the new volume in the left side and it would be formatted as Mac OS X Extended by default.

Format a Parition:-

Run this application, select the hard drive containing the volume to be formatted, on the left. Now, select this volume in the middle pane and click Format button. Now, click Start button, and then click Continue button on the message that pops up , After this task is finished, you can see this partition as empty.

Delete Partition:-

Select the volume which you want to delete and click to the delete button on toolbar. This process will help you to delete selected volume from your Mac hard drive.

Hide/Reveal partition:-

Stellar Partitioning software has an awesome feature in which you can hide selected volume for security purpose. This feature is not present in Disk Utility. Hidden partition can only be revealed by this tool.

Resize Mac partition:-

When you resize Mac volume by using Stellar Partition tool, it keeps all free spaces together (shift free space) so that you could make new volume but, this facility is not present in Disk Utility.

If you do resize on Mac volume with Disk Utility, free space will remain between two partition. So, Stellar Partition Manager is quite far better than Disk Utility.

Stellar Drive ToolBox the only one solution of your slow Mac

‘Why is my Mac Running Slow?’, it's very general question asked by many Mac users and the answer is quite simple ....

Most of us forget to clean Mac drive on regular basis , which leads to sluggish Mac performance. Mac systems are easy to use and trouble free but . It doesn't mean , you should ignore system maintenance. Because ,with the passage of time , there are lots of caches, hidden files, logs, duplicate files get stored in Mac , which consumes useful memory space. As a result of this , your Mac becomes more dirtier, hotter, slower, and less effective than is was on day one. Here are some tips, which helps you to bring your Macs glory back.

Stellar Drive ToolBox- A powerful and efficient tool to keep your Mac healthy

This software is a complete pack of 13 utilities, different utilities has different features. It has, surface scan, drive performance, drive status, partition Manager, Speed Up Mac, clone, Drive defrag, data encryption, wipe, stellar shield, Raw data editor, volume repair, Drive initilize.

Surface scan:-  Very useful tool to detect bad memory block in Mac drive. It helps to find out all bad sectors in Mac hard drive and provides information about it. You can resolve disk startup issues, disk read issues by scanning whole Mac drive with this tool.

Drive Initilize:- You can format your Mac hard drive and create HFS+ and FAT 32 partition.  You can initialize your Mac disk for making it compatible with the PowerPC Mac. You can choose GUID, Apple partition table  or MBR as per need.

Drive Performance:-  It helps you to test your system performance by comparing I/O data transfer rate. You can see the graphical representation of result after analysing.

Volume Repair:-  It safely verifies, repair and rebuild Mac hard drive volume. It helps you to repair permissions of various files and applications. 'Rebuild option' performs Verify and Repair operations simultaneously.

SpeedUp Mac:- This tool helps to scan whole system and deletes all duplicate files, large files, caches, system junks.

Drive Status:- This module helps to discover all basic details, full drive description and SMART Status of any Mac hard drive.

Drive Defrag:- This option helps to keep all fragmented data together in Mac hard drive to increase the speed of Mac. There are many options inside this tool like full defragmentation, Quick defragmentation, Metadata defragmentation, bootable DVD. You can get email notification after the completion of defrag process.

Partition Manager:-  This utility helps you to create, delete, format, resize and manage Mac partitions. These partitios can be easily hide/reveal for safety purpose.

Stellar shield:-  It keeps image of hard drive and you can restore eaisly from backup.

Raw Data Editor:- An advance users can use this utility. They can change minor corruption in file structure and modify Mac volume.

Stellar Wipe:- This utility helps to wipe unwanted and sensitive data from Mac drive. This kind of wipe data helps to stop unauthorised access of your Mac data.

Drive Clone:- Mac users can easily keep backup of their Mac data by using this utility. You can either keep your Mac data in the form of image or clone. Clone helps to create bootable backup of your whole Mac. It allows you resize volumes on target drive.

Data Encryptor:- Everybody wants to keep data secure, data Encryptor tool is the best solution of this issues. This tool changes your data into unreadable form and keep them private so that nobody could read it. Other decryption utility can not decrypt Mac data. This utility is the bonus utility by Stellar Drive ToolBox.

This tool of stellar is an awesome and works effectively with your Mac. However Many people says that Mac is the most stylist and advance Operating system so one does not need to keep such type of utility. But, it's my practicle experience that you can keep your Mac running fast and alive state with the help of using any Third party tool.

Issues With Time Machine in Mac Mountain Lion

Mac OS X is one of the most popular operating systems among tech people. It is very demandable and trustworthy for its unique integrated features and performance. One of the popular utility is 'Time Machine'. It is a data back-up utility developed by Apple for the Mac OS X. It was introduced with the release of Mac OS X 10.5.

The need of backup was felt a long before the launch of Time Machine in Mac. Mac users used to backup their data using CD/DVD or writing data in some external drive. But, it was lengthy and expensive process. The process was not widely accepted because whenever changes were made in original data the respective changes were not updated in respective backup.

Time Machine creates incremental backups of files, which can be restored at later date. So, if you delete any files mistakenly, you can recover easily with time machine. It works with iLife, iWork and several other compatible programs. Time Machine saves hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month until the volume runs out of space.

How Time Machine works?

It copies the files on your computer to a destination hard drive as a back up to protect you in case of any disaster or data loss. It keeps Incremental backup and works with Time Capsule.

What is Time Capsule?

The backup device used by time machine is called Time capsule. An external drive is used for keeping Backup data in Mac OS X and it is called Time capsule.

Incremental backup- An incremental backup is a type of backup that only copies files that have changed since the last backup. It saves time and money both. But, Mac user can face some limitations or drawback of Time Machine .

Problems related to Time Machine in Mountain Lion:-

1. Backup is not bootable:- Even though Time Machine backs up every file on your disk but if your internal HD fails, you can't boot directly from your Time Machine backups.

However, if you're using Lion 10.7.2 or above, and backing-up to a directly-connected external HD, there's probably a copy of your Recovery HD on the Time Machine drive, so if your internal HD fails, you can restore from that.

2. It doesn't keep data forever :- Time Machine doesn't keep its copies of changed/deleted items forever, and you're usually not notified when it deletes them(hourly backups combine and expire after a day).

3. It doesn't give you much control:- You can tell Time Machine to ignore particular files or folders by adding them to its Do Not Back Up list, But, you can’t exclude files based on certain criteria e.g all movie files over 2GB in size.

4. Doesn't compress files:- It doesn’t store duplicate copies of identical files, so it doesn’t compress your files.

5. Encryption:- By physical access of your Time Machine backup disk anyone can read all your files because It doesn't encrypt them.

6. Not compatible with FileVault:- Time Machine backs up FileVault-encrypted user folders only after logged out session—and does not permit file-by-file restoration of your FileVault data using the Time Machine program.

7. Doesn’t Use Optical Discs :- Time Machine can store its data only on a hard disk, not on CDs or DVDs

Keep backup with Stellar Drive ToolBox:-

Stellar Drive ToolBox is the complete pack of 13 utilities, it's upcoming version is 3.0. Drive clone is one of the most demandable backup utility which helps to keep backup of your Mac data. Time Machine cannot make clone of your Mac data but, you can easily create bootable backup of your Mac data which helps you to boot your system in case of any disaster. This utility provides many features like' image option', you can create image of your Mac data. So, this tool has the power to sole all your backup needs. The other benefit , you can gain from this tool is the maintenance utility which helps you to do partition, speed up, defrag, wipe, encryption etc. for your Mac.

Safeguard Precious Data by Keeping a Clone of Mac Hard Drive

 

Has your Mac hard drive crashed and all your important on-going works have been stopped?

You could have easily avoided such a situation, if you have created and kept a clone of your Mac hard drive.

In day to day operations, your hard drive works continuously to give the require output. As the primary data storage media of your Mac notebook or desktop computer, hard drive stores all the processed data first. Even though many users are taking back-up of their important data these days, they usually use external hard drive for backup purpose.

Users have been more educated with respect to the maintenance needs of their Macs and are keeping data recovery software with them. Thus, if at any point of computer usage, users encounter instances of file deletion, accidental media formatting, file system corruption, OS malfunction or virus infection, they use data recovery software to get back the lost data. These are the logical data loss situations, in which data recovery software are able to retrieve the lost or inaccessible data back from the troubled Mac media.

Data inaccessibility due to physical damage to the Mac hard drive is a far more critical instance of data loss than that of any logical one. Hard drive of your Mac incorporates many electro-mechanical components in it, including the read/write head, spindle motor, magnetic platter, printed circuit board (PCB) etc. All these components contribute towards the smooth functioning of the drive. Thus failure of any of the components results in hard drive crash and complete data inaccessibility.

There can be a number of reasons, which can trigger the failure of your Mac hard drive, such as mechanical components failure, electrical short-circuit, firmware corruption, heavy magnetic flow, any liquid going inside the drive, natural disasters (flood, earthquake, fire, storm etc.) etc.

In case of physical damage to the hard drive, there is nothing lies in the hands of the user. Any experimentation only leads to further damage to the hard drive causing permanent loss of precious data. In case of physical damage to the Mac hard drive, the recovery is out of the scope of any data recovery software and you have to take the help of a professional data recovery service provider.

However, data recovery service can not guaranty the recovery of 100% recovery and depending upon the magnitude of data loss, you may lose some data to it. Moreover, during the data recovery process, you have to sit idle and all your important on-going work hampers. All these problems can be avoided, once you keep a clone of your Mac hard drive.

The cloned drive can be used as an replacement of your original Mac drive and you do not need to stop the important work for recovery. These days, there are many Mac cloning utilities available in the market, using which you can easily clone your hard drive, volume or any selected region of the drive. The process of cloning Mac hdd is pretty simple and moreover, you are safe-guarding your precious data with it.

How Mac handle hot cluster zone?

Fragmented hard drive is not rare problem , it occurs over a period of time in every hard drive in installed OS. When you save, delete, write several files in hard drive, empty space are created which is responsible for the scattered data over Mac disk. When you save new data and if it is larger than empty space , OS X keeps it into noncontinuous memory in hard drive. But, some OS like Mac OS X has the capability to prevent fragmentation by using some safety guards so that, users will never feel about the situation of their Mac hard drive.

Mac OS X has new file system i.e HFS+ which has ability to decrease the chance of file fragmentation in Mac drive. If the size of the file is 20MB and it has less than 8 fragments then OS X defrags all these types of files automatically. Another option is 'Hot File Adaptive clustering' which monitors frequently-accessed files between OS and hard drive, and then moves these files to a special zone called Hot File Adaptive clustering on the hard drive. Mac OS X defragments these files at the time of transferring into hot Zone. OS X has faster communication with this Hot Zone and it helps to keep your Mac optimized.

Hot File Clustering (HFC) aims to increase the performance of small, frequently accessed files from Mac volumes. This process is currently used only on boot volumes. HFC is a multi-staged clustering scheme that keeps record "hot" files on a volume, and moves them to the "hot space" on the volume . The various stages in this scheme are DISABLED, IDLE, BUSY, RECORDING, EVALUATION, EVICTION, and ADOPTION. Only files less than 20 MB in size are "adopted" under this scheme.

Note - Hot files on your system will depend on usage pattern in your Mac from last few days. If you are doing extensive C programming from a week then it is likely that many of your hot files will have C headers.

Inspite of all these , there are some circumstances occurs in which you need some third party tool to defrag your Mac:-

1. When you have big large files such as video files in your hard drive.

2. When your Mac hard drive gets completely filled and it has less than 10% free space.

In both above mentioned situations, the built in safeguards of Mac OS fails to prevent defragmentation, and it results sluggish behaviour of their Mac machine . Stellar Drive Defrag is one of the famous Mac defragmentation tool among Mac people. It helps to defrag your entire Mac or any selected file. Through Free version of this tool, you can check the status of your Mac drive, how much it is defragmented.

Paid version of this tool has many advance features like you can see the temperature fluctuation in Mac hard drive with the help of temperature bar. You can see the status of fragmented data free space and filled disk with graphical representation. Defragmentation is a time taking process so, this tool has an option through which you can set email notification/sound to make sure that defragmentation process completed successfully.

Features of Stellar Drive Defrag:-

1. It defrags your Mac without the risk of data loss

2. It helps to improve your Mac performance

3. Temperature bar to show the fluctuations in the temperature of Mac hard drive.

4. Email notification option

5. It supports Hot File Adaptive Clustering.

Apple has many scheme to keep your Mac faster:-

Boot cache:-

Mac OS X has a boot-time optimization which monitors the pattern of incoming read requests to the boot disk, and sorts the request pattern into a "playlist", which is used to cluster reads into a private cache. This "boot cache" is then used for satisfying incoming read requests fastly, if possible. The scheme also measures the cache hit rate, and stores the request pattern into a "history list" for use in future. If the hit rate is low then caching is disabled.

This feature is only supported for root device and it requires minimum 128 MB of physical RAM for enabling it. Entire process remains invisible from users. /System/Library/Extensions/BootCache.kext is the location of the kernel extension.

Helping Developers Create Faster Code:-

Apple provides number of performance measurement/debugging tools for Mac OS X. Some of these you can get with Mac OS and for other tools you need to download from Aple site.

Journaling in HFS Plus:-

On a journaled HFS Plus Mac volume, file object metadata and volume structures are journaled, but file object data are not journaled. The primary purpose of the journal is to make recovery process faster and reliable, in case a volume is unmounted , it helps to improve the performance of metadata operation.