How to Keep Your OS X Mountain Lion Hard Drive Healthy and Well-Tuned

Although Mac offers a reliable working platform and is way ahead in competition to others, it can move into despair if proper maintenance is not performed on your part on a routine basis. You need to keep your hard drives healthy by performing regular checkups to drive away all the potential problems. Hard drive corruption may lurk in your atmosphere anytime and cause big data disasters. If your hard drive is heading to a failure, you may encounter mixed-up menus, sudden crashes, the ever-spinning beach ball and more. To get rid of all these troubles, you may want to do a little housework to keep things in order. Some of the things you can try out yourself are described below:

• Verify Preferences:

When you run across frequent crashes, unexpected system behavior, menu corruption, etc., then it is time to check your applications' preferences. The Mac OS X stores application and system-related preferences in XML files with '.plist    ' extension. You can check if the preference file of an application is corrupt using the Unix utility 'plutil'. Just run the following command at the terminal:

'sudo plutil -s ~/Library/ Preferences/*.plist' 

If you receive some output, then the preference file is possibly corrupt. You should delete all the corrupt preference files and restore your preferences from a backup.

• Repair Permissions:

Permissions are applied to Apple-originated objects (system files and folders) to grant users access to these files. If these permissions get modified, you may face myriad problems, such as you cannot change preferences for certain applications, you cannot save files to the disk, etc. This primarily happens when you install applications that contain system-level components. You can correct them by using the ‘Repair Disk Permissions’ feature of Apple’s Disk Utility. This will repair permissions on the system-level files and folders stored on your startup disk.

• Delete Cache Files:

Cache files hold information temporarily to help applications load faster, speed up the display of screen data, and make your system function well. These files may become too large and get corrupt. As a consequence, the applications may get a little sluggish or you may notice menus containing strange characters. You should delete cache files periodically from the ‘System-> Library-> Caches’ folder to avoid this corruption.

If you still find problems with your Mac, take help of professional Mac Data Recovery tools to quickly recover Mac data and avoid any data disaster. These competent utilities can efficiently recover every piece of lost, deleted, or formatted information from your system.