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Permalink Reply by Adriana on January 22, 2012 at 6:28pm

That sounds like a virus, possibly.  What mail software were you using?

I have antivirus software on my Macbook, and my maintenance routine is automated.  I have not backed up what I have on this computer, though. I do not have any valuable documents on my home computer. The most valuable stuff I produce is at work, and backed up into a server, all automated.

I do have a couple of external drives where I have family stuff such as photos.

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Permalink Reply by Chris on January 23, 2012 at 12:03am

I'm using Mac Mail and I have Norton Anti-Virus that I don't run very often.  I usually put my computer to sleep after I'm done using it.  It does sound like it might be a virus. I'll run the anti-virus software tonight. Yesterday I verified the preferences which resulted in the message:

/bin/sh:xargs: command could not be found. I think I used Drive Genius 2 to get that. I don't get that message anymore when I check the preferences. 

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Permalink Reply by Michel on January 22, 2012 at 6:35pm

I'm the worst =/

I have three drives, two with ancient stuff mixed with partial back-ups of my main drive. I would need to do a manual clean-up of my semi back-up drives first. Long and ubertedious. Then I need to find a good back-up software, but before I even attempt to do all this, I need to decide what I do with all my files.

I have video, sound, photo, web images, art, ebooks files and project folders that contain all sorts of workfiles and a lot of applications... Some I want to keep live on one USB drive, and others archived on another one or even burned on a DVD. Days of work!

What's your OS and mail software Chris?

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Permalink Reply by Chris on January 23, 2012 at 12:39am

I'm using OS 10.5.8 and Mac Mail on a ~2006, or 2007 MacBook Pro with 2 GHz Intel Core Duo processors. Is it worth upgrading the OS - if so how high should I go - 10.6? I've never had a virus before. I've never had a hard drive crash either. The mother board failed on my last computer and on another computer I had around 1998. I've gotten corrupted files several times before on this computer (which is a hand me down) that required reinstalling the OS.

My computer is significantly faster since I optimized my files and volume. I ran each of the optimization programs multiple times. I'm going to automate the HD maintenance, and anti-virus software. So far I don't see how to automate the maintenance software. It's going to be difficult to catch up on my email after I get it fixed.

I dug out an old UPS I have with a dead battery. I wasn't able to get a battery for it when it failed. A battery only costs ~$18. I need to fix that and maybe get a larger battery incase of a power failure during optimization.

Michel,

You should consider compressing your files then put them on a DVD if you need H/D space to do a full backup. Photo's and video compresses a lot. I had to boot the RAID drive with the USB port since Macs (at least mine) won't externally boot with firewire. I wonder if newer Mac's can boot from an external Fire Wire H/D. There is a huge speed difference between firewire and USB. Mac's Time Machine is probably as good as any other backup software. When The Other World Computing Guardian MAXimus RAID 1 I bought came with Drive Genius 2. Drive Genius has back up functions and H/D maintenance features. It also came with Data Backup 3. I'll probably use Time Machine. 

Here's a link to the best Mac backup software for 2012

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Permalink Reply by Adriana on January 23, 2012 at 7:23am

The only reason I have automated maintenance is because it's a work computer. I have 10.6.8, it runs great. I have had a hard drive burn on a Macbook a few years ago. It was sad; i lost what i had in there, fortunately, not too much.

I also had a work computer totally crap out on me. It went to Apple 3 times, after it continued failing, they gave me a new one.

Time Machine is supposed to be really good.

I never ran the Mac Mail program, I always do web mail. You should set up a gmail or yahoo account.

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Permalink Reply by Chris on January 28, 2012 at 9:14pm

I have a gmail account I use for Craig's list. Every time I post an add on Craig's list I get spam mail. I also have a yahoo account I use for numerous discussion group forums I belong to. I didn't use them exclusively because they seemed like a transient address to me. They also used to limit the size of the message and were prone to spam. I had my last email address for 15 years through Oregon Economic Development. Back then they were the only providers in the town I lived in. Come to think of it that was before yahoo, or google was around. At that time I used a PC with Eudora.

I'm thinking of getting OS 10.6. Some of the HD utility software I have isn't written for OS 10.5.8 (it goes to 10.5.6) so if I upgrade that I might as well update the OS too. I'm going to check to see that my other software is compatible first. Updating software can get expensive.

It turned out that all I needed to do is rebuild the mailboxes. I used to have to do that all the time with Eudora, but forgot about doing that. Rebuilding the mailbox is easy. Under the App Mail go to Mailbox then Rebuild.

The RAID I have (Guardian Maximus) is done through software drivers, which I don't like. It puts strange files all over the place. I'd like to reformat them if I can to eliminate those files. I haven't found good directions about that yet.

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Permalink Reply by Michel on January 23, 2012 at 10:53am

Well I know next to nothing about Macs - my only Apple product is an Ipod Touch. And my own problem with back-ups is the size of my system. Close to 1TB. Just optimizing the main drive will take something like a day!

But I will have to do it soon because my main disk is now almost full =(

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Permalink Reply by Chris on January 28, 2012 at 9:31pm

How many hard drives do you have? Since I didn't think about just rebuilding the mailbox it's taken 4 or 5 days to do everything I did. The last time I did hard drive maintenance was two years ago so I spent a lot of time relearning what to do and how to do it. In your case Michel it might be a good idea to make sure you have some time available then sign up for a 30 day trial period with one of the on-line back up companies. You might have to pay something to get all your data on their site since you have so much data. Doing that would give you the room you need. Files are automatically optimized when they are moved to another hard drive. It might be a good idea to compress, or archive some of the files to free up some space. Maybe this tutorial will help. According to the table on that site I was wrong about photos and video compressing well. I wonder how I got that wrong. 

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