Account "bloat"?

On my computer, I've created a new account to do some work off to the side. The first thing I've noticed in the new account is how fast everything is—Programs load in less than half the time they did in my "normal" account, and they generally used far less RAM. Keep in mind that this new account is still running on the same hardware as my regular account, which now seems really sluggish by comparison. What causes this "bloat" in my normal account that starts to slow it down, and what are some tried-and-true ways to make it faster (preferably without throwing too much money at it—I'd prefer using Terminal to clean out a cache versus buying better hardware).
*Check out my blog—Cups of Cocoa*

Kappy's Personal Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
For disk repairs use Disk Utility. For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utilities are: Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.x is now Intel Mac compatible. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.5.1 or higher are Intel Mac compatible; Drive Genius is similar to TechTool Pro in terms of the various repair services provided. Versions 1.5.1 or later are Intel Mac compatible.
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep. Dependence upon third-party utilities to run the periodic maintenance scripts had been significantly reduced in Tiger and Leopard. These utilities have limited or no functionality with Snow Leopard and should not be installed.
OS X automatically defrags files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems.
I would also recommend downloading the shareware utility TinkerTool System that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old logfiles and archives, clearing caches, etc. Other utilities are also available such as Onyx, Leopard Cache Cleaner, CockTail, and Xupport, for example.
For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the commandline. Note that AppleJack 1.5 is required for Leopard. AppleJack 1.6 is compatible with Snow Leopard.
When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
Backuplist
Carbon Copy Cloner
Data Backup
Deja Vu
iBackup
JaBack
Silver Keeper
MimMac
Retrospect
Super Flexible File Synchronizer
ynchronizer
SuperDuper!
Synchronize Pro! X
SyncTwoFolders
Synk Pro
Synk Standard
Tri-Backup
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.
Additional suggestions will be found in Mac Maintenance Quick Assist.
Referenced software can be found at www.versiontracker.com and www.macupdate.com.

Similar Messages

How do I do a clean install, and keep mail accounts?

A little background: We have several Macs, and several email accounts. We're buying new machines and on some would like to mostly start over, using the App Store to install programs as each machine requires, cutting out a lot of the disk loading.
The most important goal is to get a fresh install, BUT keep all the various Mail accounts (let's establish that as a starting point). BTW: All our machines have the same Mail accounts across the board.
What I'm getting so far is a bloated HDD when I try to upgrade directly over Snow Leopard, and a nice tight machine that lacks the Mail accounts when doing a clean install.
SPECIAL REQUEST: I normally appreciate when people take guesses about offering solutions, BUT in this case I would appreciate it if answers addressed the specific question of preforming an almost clean install that retained all the email accounts, their configurations, and their messages. I realize that the solution request here may be a bridge too far, but I thought I would ask because I suspect a lot of people moving to the mid-2011 MacBook Air might need such a solution too.
Thanks in advance!
Chris

Found the answer elsewhere.
Working with 2 machines; original one with Snow Leopard and the source email accounts/messages/etc., and a second machine with a Clean Install of OSX 10.7 Lion loaded to a fresh or reformatted hard drive. In my case, coming from a 24" iMac (320GB HD) that had the source email accounts I wanted to keep, and going to a new mid-2011 MacBook Air with 128GB HD.
Long story short, starting from the "user"/Library/... account on the Snow Leopard machine, 3 things have to be copied to the Lion machine and placed in the same directories:
/Keychains
/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist
/Mail (folder)
Keep in mind that the user Library is a hidden folder in Lion.

Changing administrator user name or short name in accounts, OS upgrade

I just inherited an older MacBook Pro. (15-inch, 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo, OSX 10.4.11).
I was able to change most account info, however former user's short name still appears as the short name in adm account and in the home page sidebar. How can I change this? (I understand there is a third party utility -- Change Short Name -- that claims to easily do this, but I'm reluctant to use any third party app if there is a Apple-endorsed way to accomplish the task.)
Do I need to set up a new administrator account on the computer in order to delete his info?
Also, eventually, I need to delete a lot of programs and files from computer. Bloated. My first thought is to simply do a clean reinstall since there's really nothing on the computer that I need. (However the original install discs were lost in a move, and I'll need to contact Apple for replacement.) I've read post advising against this approach because of the number of updates needed and due to uncited problems. Has anyone experienced any problems with this approach on this model -- before I purchase old install discs.
Is better option to purchase Snow Leopard. I have it installed on Mac Pro at work. I like it and have not experienced any problems. Anyone experience problems with SL on this model of MBP.
Thanks in advance for the help.

[Adding a new user account to your computer|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh168.html] You just need to make sure that the new account is set to be an administrator account. Then you log into the new account and remove the old account from there. There shouldn't be any implications to doing this but it is always a good idea to make sure you have a fully bootable (cloned) backup before doing modifications.
As mentioned before, ideally you should just wipe wipe the drive and start afresh. This ensures any corrupt files, or hidden files, are removed. However, you will need the installer disc to do this. Since you no longer have the Tiger one it might be worth just going for Snow Leopard. However, one advantage to getting replacement original discs from Apple is they contain special software for diagnosing problems on your specific model computer that isn't in a retail set of discs.
Cloning And Backup Tools
A bootable clone is an exact copy of your drive which is capable of booting your computer. Making a copy of your computer which is capable of actually starting the computer requires special copying procedures. Some people just back up data files but if you have problems you have to reinstall all your operating system and all your applications. With a bootable clone you just start up from the backup drive and clone back everything.
To copy files from one hard drive to another hard drive you can use:
[CarbonCopy Cloner|http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html] (donationware)
[SuperDuper|http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html] (shareware)
[IBackup|http://www.grapefruit.ch/iBackup/index.html] (free)
The Restore function of Disk Utility included in OS X. [Kappy's directions|http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8799711#8799711]
[Tri-Backup (commercial)|http://www.tri-edre.com/english/tribackup.html] (payware)
[Silverkeeper|http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper> (free) - version 2 has some issues (references: [1|http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/backup/index.html#d12jan2009],
[2|http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/backup/index.html#d13jan2009]) and it is recommended Tiger users stick with 1.1.4.
[Kappy's Backup Software Recommendations|http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=9065665#906 5665]
[Overview of Mac OS X Backup Programs|http://8help.osu.edu/1247.html]

Does a gmail account use a lot of disk space?

I have recently moved my domain from a pop account to a gmail hosted domain, and my employer has us using gmail. I have made IMAP accounts to get my gmail content in Apple Mail. After a couple of months, my available disk space has gone from 30G to 5, without noteworthy additions of applications or files. It's all mail. Is a gmail account a disk hog? If so, are there ways of containing it?

I think I've got my arms around this problem. I've actually recovered about 65G of disk space in the process.
Google's version of IMAP combined with Apple Mail is a chatty, noisy, wasteful system. Google creates many folders that replicate a message (or are pointers to the same message). When Apple Mail syncs with Gmail, those folders are created on your hard drive and have actual copies (not pointers) of the messages. Caches are also spawned and the whole bloated mess is constantly syncing and spawning more temp, cache, and envelope files.
A solution is to go into gmail (on the web) look at settings, and then under the Label tab, turn off IMAP syncing with all those extra directories (like All Mail) Just turn them off.
There are two benefits:
It won't expand out of control on your hard drive (1 have .5G on gmail which bloated to 65G on my hard drive)
The constant synching and passing back and forth of files for these various folders will be choked off and you won't risk getting cut off for excessive bandwidth usage.

HELP! serious problem receiving mail in iMac account

Here's is what seems to be happening:
I received my mail and the progress window showed it flowing in. I can spot the important items before they appear in the inbox by the title. Today there was a very important email from my daughter and it seemed to be downloading just fine.
However, when I went to look for it, it was nowhere to be found! I searched everywhere. I searched in the search field by using words that I remembered in the Subject line. I search by using the "From" typing my daughter's name. Nothing! It had completely evaporated.
I tried to download it again in my imac account and there was no mail to be downloaded.
What do I do to retrieve an important email that the Mail.app seems to have trashed without my permission?
The scary thing is that Mail may have been doing this on a regular basis while my attention diverted to something else.
BTW, I did rebuild my inbox, but the wanted mail would not appear.
Griff

Yes, I mean Activity viewer, my bad!
And my account is a POP account.
And yes I have searched all available mailboxes and in my search have included "All Mailboxes." I also did Google Desktop and Spotlight searches just in case it might reside in a folder deep in the Library file system. It just doesn't exist!
I could see this email being downloaded and waited for it to appear in the inbox but when Mail.app had finished it didn't appear.
To update, this a.m. I thought I would give Entourage a try and it found the missing message in my .mac account, downloaded it and I was able to get it successfully.
I for one am giving up on Mail.app since I can't afford to have this happen again. I will go back to Entourage until Apple fixes the problem. If you search through the Apple Discussions in Mail & Address Book you will find a surprising number of people reporting their Mail mysteriously disappearing from their inboxes - especially lately. I for one am going to abandon Mail.app and go back to Entourage which seems much more reliable; slow, ponderous, bloated, but reliable.
Griff

Bloat in iMovie (iPhoto Library & Events)

I'm trying to get rid of the memory and hard drive bloat in iMovie to hopefully get it running faster.
1) What is the point of having the iPhoto Library connected to iMovie? It seems like iMovie loads the entire thing which seems like an insane amount of waste. I'm NEVER going to use anything in iPhoto except once in a blue moon. Can this be gotten rid of?
2) I always delete everything from "projects" and all the clips I can see when I'm done exporting so there isn't loads of bloat in the next project. However, when I click on "All Events" there is one event sitting there with like 25Gigs of crap in it. I can't open it or do anything with it. It's just sitting there. What is this? How do I get rid of it?
Thanks!!!

Hi
I would set iPhoto to open a new empty photo library
- Start iPhoto and keep alt-key down during up-start - select to do a new library
Next time iMovie will start faster
Else a note I made for iDVD - but same goes for iMovie (most of it)
TO GET IT TO WORK SLIGHTLY FASTER
Minimum of 25Gb free space on Start-Up hard disk for SD-Video Quality and about 4 - 5 times more - if it is a HD-Project.
No other programs running in BackGround e.g. Energy-Saver
Don’t let HD spin down or be turned off (in Energy-Save)
Do not have more external devices connected as is of urgent need. Move hard disks that are not to be used to Trash - Or to be disconnected/turned off
Goto Spotlight and set the rest of them under Integrity (not to be scanned)
Set screen-saver to a folder without any photo
First - then make an active corner (up right for me) and set pointer to this
Secondly - turns on screen saver
Then - to show that it has nothing to show
No File Vault on - Important
NO - TimeMachine - during iMovie/iDVD work either ! IMPORTANT
Lot's of icons on DeskTop/Finder also slows down the Mac noticeably
if a project is in a real hurry
First - Then Start a new User-Account and
Then - log into this and iMovie get's faster too
And let Mac run on Mains - not just on battery
Yours Bengt W

I have account member ACC15015.for intersection of N0_version,No_Scenario,No_Entity I WNAT TO CAOP THIS aCC15015 DATA TO EACH SCENARIO,EACH VERSION AND LEV 0 MEMBER OF ENTITY.PLZ HELP ME

i have account member ACC15015.for intersection of N0_version,No_Scenario I,No_Entity I have some data for this intersectionNOW I WANT TO CYOP THIS aCC15015 DATA TO EACH SCENARIO,EACH VERSION AND LEV 0 MEMBER OF ENTITY.
WHAT IS THE SSCRIPT FOR THIS
PLZ HELP ME

I guess my first question is why? One of the beauties of Essbase is the efficient way it stores the data. If you are using this for a calculation, you can just reference the intersection where the data exists. Bloating your database by creating blocks for all of these intersections is counter-productive.

Bloated AppData/Roaming/Adobe folder

I'm running Win7 x64 and noticed I was down to the last 7 GB of storage on my 120GB app disk. I've only got about 50 GB of apps so it looked like something was amiss. I did some poking around and discovered the Users/username/AppData/Roaming folder had 41 GB of stuff in it. 36 GB is in one folder, Adobe. I have Master Collection CS5, but the program files for all of it (stored in another folder, of course) only add up to about 15 GB. Anybody know what this stuff is for? Can any of it be safely deleted? Thanks.

OK, I've figured out the problem. The sub-folder Common/Media Cache Files stores cached versions of After Effects, Premiere, and Soundbooth files and is not automatically cleansed. There were hundreds of these .cfa and .pek files that accounted for 99% of the bloat. See this post and this help file entry. Problem solved by cleaning the database, deleting some additional unused files, and moving the cache to my scratch disk from my apps SSD.

Mail will not receive any incoming mail from either of my 5 accounts

I have not been able to receive mail to my leopard mail.app for quite some time now... which is odd, as I can easily receive mail to my iphone on all the same accounts.
I thought at one point it was pgp, but now when I have completely re-installed leopard and manually moved mailboxes over, I still have same problem.
Anybody out there with a similar problem, solution?
Thanks

Thank you!
Well that is exactly it, nothing happened... when using connection doctor, it would say something like 'cannot connect to server' or something other, which is odd, since I have had this setup running for ages on all accounts nothing was new.
I could send at times with a long delay, but had not been able to pull down messages for good 2 weeks, and prior to that, it seemed that on some networks I could pull down, but on others I could not. (taking into consideration that I am travelling all the time, and use probably 20 different wifi's pr week)
Anyhows, after browsing the net most of today without finding much of anything, I just figured that my mail folder must just be a tad bloated (well I had more than 16000 sent messages). So I moved all my sent messages to a seperate folder, and deleted all my mail accounts, but kept my mail in folders.
Did a new setup of so far 2 of the email addresses, and they are running fine.
But can mail actually get too bloated, what is the limit?
Thanks again.

Cannot remove email account

I am trying to remove one of my Palm Pre e-mail accounts and it will not remove completely. I have now tried 5 times and have reset the device twice. It looks as if the account was partially removed, but it still appears in the list of accounts on my main screen and in the Preferences & Accounts page. The only box that now appears under the account is the Outbox. There's nothing in it. My last attempt to remove the account was about 30 minutes ago. It still says "Removing Account..." and continues to spin. I'm fairly sure it will never finish.
The account I'm removing is a POP mail account. The reason I'm removing it is because my Trash folder had become so bloated. It contained about 4200 items at time of removal. I'm hoping someone at Palm will eventually wake up and provide an Empty Trash command (or better yet, an auto empty feature). I suspect this is the only e-mail software known to mankind in which you cannot empty the trash. It blows my mind.
Anyway, my main problem right now is this account that will not go away. Has anyone else had this problem? Is there a solution that does not involve a hard reset?
Thanks in advance...
Post relates to: Pre p100eww (Sprint)

UPDATE:
After a mere 6 hours, I finally got a notification that the e-mail account was removed! And indeed it is now completely gone.
Silly me for being impatient! So let this be a lesson for anyone else deleting a "large" e-mail account. It could take a REALLY LONG time to remove an account. I suspect my 4200 messages is small as compared with some power users out there.
Note to Palm:
For starters, it would be nice if there was a warning that account removal may take a long time. Also, it seems to be done in the background, so there's no reason for the user to hang around waiting. You can even quit the email app (I guess). Beyond this, I have to say that it is absurd that removing any e-mail account should take over 6 hours. Clearly something is fundamentally wrong with the way the data is stored and/or deleted by the e-mail app. As a user, I think it's reasonable to expect such an operation to take no longer than 1 minute.

Why is my live account on my iPad sending 2 copies of each email

WWhy when I send a email on my live account from my iPad is it sending the email twice what can I do too stop this

"Other" is all of your app data, files and documents, bookmarks, Safari History, emails, Notes, Calendars, Contacts, photos associated with contacts, your Camera Roll or Saved Album in the Photos app - non purchased content. You need your "other" but it should not become bloated to more than .75GB in most cases. That is a sign that the sync went screwy.
The last resort is to restore the iPad, but quite often another sync, restart or a reset will clear it up as well.
Restart the iPad by holding down on the sleep button until the red slider appears and then slide to shut off. To power up hold the sleep button until the Apple logo appears and let go of the button.
Reset the iPad by holding down on the sleep and home buttons at the same time for about 10-15 seconds until the Apple Logo appears - ignore the red slider - let go of the buttons.

IPhone/Exchange HTML Email - Bloating

We have noticed that when sending HTML format email from PC Client (using Exchange 2003) and replying with iPhone that after 5-6 exchanges - the size of the email increases from around 9KB to over 2MB.
When sending email from iPhone after this bloat - the phone locks up and then reboots. This does not happen when sending email in simple text format.
I have also tried this using a POP account (Comcast) and never experienced bloat or phone crash.
Any ideas?
Anyone else have this problem?

Yes! I noticed this EXACT problem about a month ago. I posted a topic here, no replies. Submitted a bug report with Apple, no response. Problem has existed in 2.0, 2.0.1 and 2.0.2. It only happens with HTML formatted emails when Outlook 2007 is in the mix. Outlook 2003 there are no issues. I've had to write a VBA script in Outlook to process on every email I get and convert it to plain text. This is far from an acceptable solution, but it's the only solution right now.

Music Folder Bloating

I am a new MacBook owner, long time iTunes user. For the longest time I have used iTunes and 2 iPods (shuffle and 20gb upgraded recently to a 60gb). My iPod was what made me fall in love end eventually buy a MacBook. I got my MacBook custom made with a 120GB hard drive and proceeded to import about 30GB of music.
All was fine until a week later when I was getting warning that my hard drive was full! It turned out that the 30GB of music I had suddenly created a Music folder of around 70GB, I could hardly believe it. I want to let iTunes take care of my music folders and organise everything for me, but since then I have had to switch off all automatic options and manually handle the folders myself.
Can anyone tell me what options are good to use and what are bad? It seems that my ~/Music/iTunes/ folder is populated with duplicate music of the ~/Music/ folder and various other bloat bugs. I have all my music stored on an external hard drive, but I want to be able to import it to my MacBook and let iTunes take care of everything without the pain of bloating.

I don't think its iTunes. Windows says my music folder is 27 GB, but itunes says its 20 GB. The reason is that there is 7 GB of files in my music folder which isn't in itunes.
If you delete files from itunes, it ask if you want to keep the file. If you say yes, the file stays in the music folder. If you do this enough, there is a disparity in the values. Also, itunes doesn't use wma files, but will convert them. If these wma files are in your music folder they will account for the space occupied, but itunes will not recognize them.

Sign in to account used to purchase app

I purchased and downloaded ML and now should be able to redownload it and install on additional computers.
When I unhide ML and try to download it again for another computer I get a window that states --
"You have updates available for other accounts.
To update this application, sign in to the account you used to purchase it."
I only have one Apple ID account and password.
My single Apple ID account is used for this Forum, the iTunes Store and the Mac App Store.
How do I resolve this problem ?

Thanks for the quick reply.
Yes, I have the Spotlight indexing feature turned off to speed up all of my computers and not bloat the Hard Drive with its indexing data. Spotlight also slows down the availability of flash drives and external HDs when they are plugged in so I turn off theSpotlight indexing for them also.
I use EasyFind for my Searching.

Jabber Options - Phone Accounts - Voicemail -- "Spinning Wheel"

Been trying to resolve a nagging issue.   We currently have CUCM 8.6.2-20000-2, CUPS 8.6.4-10000-28 and just put up Unity Conn 9.1. Jabber Win clients are 9.2(1).   Several people have not been able to integrate voicemail into the Jabber client.
We are totally MS AD integrated.   In CUPS, I had Applications -> Cisco Jabber -> Settiings Credentials Used For Voicemail service set to CUPS so the user would not need to supply credentials. To help me debug, I went and changed this setting to "Not Set" so that the Phone Accounts option appears in Jabber 4 Win client.
So far all the people who do not work access the Phone Accounts setting in the Jabber client see the "Spinning Wheel".   They can't see the fields to enter their AD creds and the voicemail server.   Reinstall of the client does not seem to help. There seemed to be a bug that described this but I think it was fixed in 9.1(2). You can't display the Bug description because it contains proprietary info.
I have attached a screen shot of my Jabber Client Phone Account -- when I enter the credentials, I log in fine.
Anyone seen this or know how to fix?
TIA --- Perry

Well, I had TAC look at this issue. Short story is that it was an issue with one of the *many* local cache files which hid the real source of the problem. I actually had the Mailstore misconfgured in CUPS. I used the Exchange server's CAS IP instead of Unity Connection.   We created new Mailstore definition that used the Unity Conn IP's, created a new Voicemail Profile and associated the user to that profile.   She worked....
I deleted my all my Jabber for Windows local cache files and I then received the "spining wheel" issue. I moved my ID to the new Voicemail Profile with correct Mailstore and I could connect fine.   TAC spent an hour pouring through files on my PC and could not find the reason why my ID was working.   TAC indicates that in 9.x, a lot of this configuration moves to CUCM and hopefully cuts down on these issues! PRT files from the Jabber client really did not assist them in locating the problem.
Hope this helps....

Account "bloat"?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for