It’s a good idea to check the hard drive health of a Mac as part of a periodic maintenance routine. Doing this is extremely easy with Disk Utility, here’s how to do it and what to do if you encounter any issues:

1. Launch Disk Utility, found within the /Applications/Utilities folder
2. Select the Mac hard drive from the left side menu and click on the “First Aid” tab
3. Click on “Verify Disk” in the lower right corner and let it run

You will find the window populating with messages about the drives health, messages that indicate things are fine appear in black, messages that indicate something is wrong appears in red. For the vast majority of users it will look something like this, finalizing with a message of “The partition map appears to be OK”, indicating no errors:

Verifying partition map for “APPLE Media”
Checking prerequisites
Checking the partition list
Checking for an EFI system partition
Checking the EFI system partition’s size
Checking the EFI system partition’s file system
Checking all HFS data partition loader spaces
Checking Core Storage Physical Volume partitions
The partition map appears to be OK

If you do see a red message saying something along the lines of “Error: This disk needs to be repaired” and it’s your boot drive, you’ll find the “Repair Disk” button is inaccessible. In this case all you need to do is reboot into the Recovery HD partition and run Repair Disk from there, here’s how to do that in OS X Lion and Mountain Lion:

Before proceeding it’s a good idea to backup your drive quickly with Time Machine.

1. Reboot the Mac and hold down Command+R (hold own Option key on some Macs)
2. Select “Recovery HD” from the boot menu
3. Choose “Disk Utility” from the Mac OS X Utilities screen
4. Click the hard drive that reported the error, click the “First Aid” tab, and now click on “Repair Disk”

After Repair Disk has ran successfully, you are free to boot OS X as normal and the drives issues should be resolved.

A few final notes: relying on a hard drive being healthy is not an alternative to having backups, you need to backup your Mac with regularity using Time Machine or some other method if you choose. Hard drives fail, it’s a fact of computing life. It’s also important to note Disk Utility isn’t a 100% conclusive test suite to determine drive health, and if you hear weird sounds coming out of the hard drive it’s probably a good time to head down to Apple and prepare for a drive swap because that drive is likely going to croak soon.

Running out of iCloud backup capacity happens quick whether you have a single iPhone or a handful of iOS devices. You’ll know this has happened because you get a friendly popup informing you of “Not Enough Storage” and that the automatic backup can not occur as a result. So what to do? There’s really two choices, one is the most obvious and involves upgrading the iCloud account, and the other is free and relies on you more actively managing your backups.

#1 – Upgrade iCloud Storage

Obviously the easiest and most immediate solution is to just buy more iCloud storage, it’s cheap and a variety of plans are offered starting at $20/year for a total of 15GB storage. Going this route is simple and recommended for those who can afford it:

• Tap on Settings, tap “iCloud” and scroll down to tap on “Storage & Backup”
• Tap “Buy More Storage” and choose the plan that works for you

Easy enough, but what if you don’t want to add a yearly expense to your iCloud account? That brings us to option number two, which is free but will involve some more effort.

#2 – Manage & Delete Old iCloud Backups

If you want to stay free, you’ll have to manage your iCloud backups a bit more hands on to clear up some space, here’s two options on how to do that.

1. Launch Settings, tap “iCloud”, then tap on “Storage & Backup”
2. Tap “Manage Storage” and tap the name of the device you are going to manage storage for, now you have two real options:
• Option 1) Turn off iCloud backups for certain apps
• Option 2) Delete the current Backup and create a new one

Option 1 really just thins down the backup size, but it’s not always a reasonable choice. If you’re going that route the first thing you’ll probably want to do on an iPhone is move the pictures to a computer and then delete them from iCloud. You can also selectively remove other apps from the backup list, though outside of photos and movies you likely won’t save much space using this method.

Option 2 clears out the existing iCloud backup and could be a better solution, but before doing so it’d be smart to connect the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a computer with iTunes and create a quick manual backup by right-clicking on the iOS device and choosing “Back Up”, this saves a backup locally to the computer just in case something goes wrong. After you’ve done that, delete the backup from iCloud Settings and then immediately start a new manual backup with iCloud by tapping “Back Up Now”, that will become the most recent backup. If you’re going this route you’re probably right on the brim of iCloud storage capacity again though, so you’ll have to do this on your own anytime you get the popup alert warning of not enough iCloud storage.

For those with multiple iOS devices, it’s probably best to just upgrade the iCloud storage. This is especially true for Mac users who intend on updating to OS X Mountain Lion, since the new version of Mac OS has even more iCloud integration and you’ll undoubtedly end up storing plenty of data in Apple’s cloud.

Troubleshooting computer problems is never particularly fun, and with so many potential third party add-ons, plugins, extensions, scripts, and whatever else is buried into OS X, how are you supposed to find everything to help determine what’s causing an issue? You need Consultant’s Canary, because whether you’re troubleshooting your own Mac or someone else’s, it’s going to save you tons of time and hassle.

Consultant’s Canary is a free self-contained python script that lists an absurd amount of information about the OS X installation that it’s launched from, including general system information, all login items, overly privileged processes, and a whole slew of third party system changes and augmentations, including address book plugins, Automator actions, additional frameworks, Safari plugins and extensions, kernel extensions, launchd jobs and launch agents, Mail plugins, third party System Preference panels, screen savers, Spotlight add ons, startup items, and more. Got all that? In other words, virtually every third party add-on that is currently installed on the Mac will be found and reported back in an easy to follow list that even includes the full file paths to the found items. Nothing is modified however, leaving the task of determining what doesn’t belong in the lists up to you.

• Get Consultant’s Canary free from KHI

Using Consultant’s Canary is easy, you can run the standalone Consultant’s Canary app directly on a single Mac which launches Terminal and a python script on it’s own, or you could open the apps package to find the heart of the app “dispatcher.py” which could then be used over a network to remotely diagnose and troubleshoot multiple Macs. The same version of Consultant’s Canary will work on any version of OS X later than 10.5, including Lion.

CC may just be the ultimate troubleshooting aid for Mac OS X, a remarkable feet for a free utility, making it’s an absolute must-have addition to a Mac power users toolkit.

Thanks to Jean N for the great tip

iOS updates can come with some unexpected surprises regarding battery life and iOS 5.1.1 isn’t much different. While there are a fair amount of reports of positive battery improvements not all of us were so lucky, the battery life on my iPad 3 absolutely tanked after updating to iOS 5.1.1.

After rebooting several times and trying a handful of troubleshooting solutions, I discovered this to be a fairly common issue with users who updated iOS through on-device OTA updates, though there doesn’t seem to be much explanation as to the cause. Fortunately the fix is simple, so if you have experienced a drop in device longevity after the 5.1.1 update try the solution below.

Before proceeding you should perform a quick manual back up through iCloud or iTunes just in case something goes wrong. This process resets all iOS device settings, meaning you will have to re-enter Wi-Fi passwords, auto-fill info, Apple ID, etc.

1. Open “Settings” and tap on “General” then “Reset”, tap on “Reset All Settings”
2. Enter the passcode if you have one set, then tap “Reset” to confirm the settings adjustment
3. Reboot the device and set it up as new, reentering personalization data as necessary

Battery life should be immediately improved, though a comment left on Apple Discussion Boards suggests letting the iPhone/iPad/iPod touch drain down to 0% and then recharging for an hour or so past 100% before disconnecting from a power source is a good follow-up.

This worked wonders for my 3rd gen iPad and battery life is now back to the 10+ hours I had before the update. If you’re still having problems you can try some of our past tips on improving and maximizing battery life for iDevices.

Automatic termination is a feature of OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion that comes from the realm of iOS, the idea is that after an app is unused for a period of time and becomes inactive, it will automatically terminate to free up resources for other tasks. With the help of the new auto-save feature, the user should theoretically never notice any of this going on and they can continue on with their work as usual when they need to, letting Mac OS X manage processes and resources for them without quitting apps or manual interaction through Activity Monitor.

For the vast majority of users this is a good thing and most are probably completely unaware of the features existence, but not everyone is thrilled with the prospect of dormant applications being quit without their command and some find it really annoying. If you fall into the second category and want to turn off automatic app termination in OS X, here is how to do it. Don’t worry, we’ll also show you how to turn it back on.

Disable Automatic Termination in Mac OS X
Launch Terminal and enter the following defaults write command:

defaults write -g NSDisableAutomaticTermination -bool yes

Relaunch apps that use auto-termination for changes to take effect.

Re-Enable Automatic App Termination in Mac OS X
You can always reenable the default behavior of OS X and turn auto termination back on:

defaults delete NSDisableAutomaticTermination

Or by reversing “yes” to “no” and running the original command again:

defaults write -g NSDisableAutomaticTermination -bool no

Again, relaunch apps for the changes to take effect and to have auto-terminate enabled again.

This is something that Mac OS X and iOS handles fairly well, and if you’ve never been annoyed by the feature it’s recommended to leave it enabled and let OS X manage tasks itself.

Thanks to qwerty for finding the tip in a StackExchange thread.

Anytime an iOS device is connected to a computer it will sync and backup the device, and though the syncing process can be annoying sometimes, the backup process should be considered crucial so that you always have a way to restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod should anything go wrong.

With that said, there are a few limited situations where some users may want to disable the iTunes & iOS backup process completely, which is different than stopping iTunes from automatically syncing because it continues to allow for device syncing but minus the backing up aspect.

We’ll show you how to turn off backups, but we want to warn everyone this is not a good idea unless you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, leaving this option best for select jailbreakers or just for demonstration purposes.

Disable iTunes Backups for iOS Devices

• Quit out of iTunes and launch the Terminal, then enter the following defaults write command:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool YES

• Relaunch iTunes, connecting iOS devices will sync but without a backup copying over

With backups disabled nothing will be added to the local directory or iCloud, and anything already there can be deleted through iTunes or manually. Remember, disabling this feature removes the ability to restore an iOS device should you need to, which for 99.9% of people is a bad thing.

Re-Enable iTunes & iOS Backups

• Quit iTunes again and launch Terminal, entering the following defaults command:

defaults delete com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled

• Relaunch iTunes and connect an iOS device to confirm backups are working again

The instructions above are intended for Mac OS X, but Windows users can disable the device backups by launching iTunes with a flag attached to it, this can be executed from the Run menu or by right-clicking iTunes:

"%ProgramFiles%\iTunes\iTunes.exe" /setPrefInt DeviceBackupsDisabled 1

To reenable backups with windows, change the 1 to a 0 and run iTunes exe again.

Thanks to Jeremy for the tips.

Many Mac users have an external hard disk for Time Machine backups or other media storage purposes, and if you leave it connected to the Mac all the time you’ve probably noticed an annoying side effect: the drive will spin down when it’s not in use, only to be spun up again unnecessarily at random during unrelated operations.

That drive spin up time is waking the disk from its sleep state which can lead to some pretty serious system dragging even on the fastest Macs, and as a result you’ll often encounter a lengthy beachball cursor that slows down a Mac as you wait for the external drive to arise from sleep. There are a couple possible remedies for this problem, read on to understand the pros and cons of both choices.

Option 1) Stop Hard Disks from Sleeping

By checking this option the external (and internal) hard disks will not spin down to sleep while not in use, this will completely prevent the drive waking lag time and beachballs, however it can also reduce the lifespan of traditional spinning hard disks. For that reason it’s best to use this option sparingly unless you don’t mind the possibility of a shorter drive life for both the internal and external hard drives. If you leave your computer turned on all the time rather than sleeping or shutting down, this is probably not the best option to use.

Option 2) Unmounting Hard Disks When Not in Use

Another solution is to simply unmount the external hard disks when they’re not in use, this will also prevent them from spinning up at random or when a open/save dialog box appears. The downside to this approach is you’ll have to manually mount the drive when you do want to use it, and Time Machine backups will not take place when the drive is unmounted.

Unmounting Disks
You can unmount a hard disk without physically detaching it by either:

1. Dragging the external disk to the Trash
2. Or, using Disk Utility to unmount the drive

Remounting the Hard Disks
If you choose this option, you can remount the drives again using the Disk Utility app to regain file system access. Remounting is just a matter of doing the following:

1. Launch Disk Utility and select the unmounted drive from the left side, unmounted drives will be grey
2. Click the blue “Mount” button in the toolbar to remount the drive
3. Exit Disk Utility

You can also physically disconnect external disks which has an added benefit of providing for a faster boot time, but that’s a pain and really isn’t a valid fix.

None of the solutions outlined above are particularly ideal and hopefully a revision of Mac OS X will change the behavior of how external hard drives are accessed so they are only spun up specifically when they are selected or used. I have encountered several individuals who mistakenly think this drive accessing behavior is their brand new Mac somehow being slow, which tells me this is a problem that should be addressed in a better fashion.

If you’ve found a better way to handle this speed problem, chime in with your thoughts or solutions in the comments.

The OS X task management tool Activity Monitor includes an excellent and little known feature that lets you see precisely what files, ports, and IP’s are being interacted with by any single process or application. Here is how to use it:

1. Launch Activity Monitor, found in /Applications/Utilities/
2. Double-click on the process or application name you want to see open files and ports for
3. Click the “Open Files and Ports” tab

The list is scrollable and shows full paths to all files that are being interacted with by the application/process. Much of the data will be unfamiliar to many users, with obscure system files, caches, and plists being accessed, but you’ll also find paths that are easy to identify which can be helpful in resolving system conflicts and troubleshooting certain problems. Similar filesystem access data can be provided with the command line tool opensnoop, but for most Mac users the GUI Activity Monitor will be more friendly to their needs.

Ports are identified as numbers, and you’ll also be able to see the IP’s of any active internet or network connections that have been opened by the application. The data is presented a little rough, if you want an easier to browse version of open network connections take a look at the free GUI tool PrivateEye. IP and port data can also be uncovered through the command line tool lsof if you’re more technically inclined.

Firefox is a great web browser but it has a few quirks that make it a less than ideal browser for OS X Lion and Mountain Lion users. A major issue is scrolling performance, which can stutter or appear slow and clunky, it’s noticeable enough that certainly anyone who has used Firefox in Mac OS X has experienced it before. Here’s the strange part, it’s completely remedied with a preference setting that is buried away:

• Open Preferences from the Firefox menu
• Click on “Advanced” and under ‘General’ check the box next to “Use smooth scrolling”

Now try scrolling up or down in a lengthy browser window to experience the perfectly smooth scrolling that is standard in other web browsers, the difference is night and day.

The big question of course is this: why on earth isn’t this enabled by default in Firefox? With smooth scrolling enabled, Firefox does use slightly more CPU only when scrolling pages, but it’s certainly not egregious enough to warrant disabling by default except perhaps on the oldest of Macs with limited resources.

Anyway, enjoy your newly improved Firefox browser and don’t miss some other Firefox tips. Heads up to ZeroDistraction for pointing out this little fluke.

Login Items are applications and helpers that launch immediately when a user logs in to Mac OS X. These are easily adjusted in system preferences, but you can also temporarily disable them on a per-boot and per-login basis.

To temporarily disable all login items and login apps from loading, hold down the Shift key when clicking the “login” button and continue holding until the desktop displays.

For Macs without a password set, you can hold the shift key after the initial grey Apple logo boot screen has passed. If you start holding Shift too early though, you will end up in Safe Mode instead.

Disabling Login Items were recently discussed as a means of speeding up boot time, using this temporary method will let you see the speed difference directly, before they’re disabled completely.

Thanks for the tip Dan