Have Any Advice for Proper Maintenance of G4?

Question

Good Morning?
I have had my Digital Audio 466 MHz G4 for several years now and it has always treated me wonderfully. However now that I have put thousands of songs from my cd collection, thousands of pictures and the multitude of data that one collects over the years onto this system, I am becoming a little paranoid about a catastrophic system failure.
I must admit, I have never backed up the hard drive or run any kind of maintenance on this system. I am now ready to start. What should I do, what programs should I use (preferably freeware) and how often? I am talking about backing up the hard drive, any kind of program that I should run to improve system performance, etc.
Currently the machine is running 10.4.8, has 768 MB of RAM, the 40GB internal hard drive that came with the system, an additional 120GB hard drive that was installed within the last year. I do have a 80GB external hard drive with a firewire connection.
I would like to thank everyone in advance for any help and for making this forum such a valuable resource.
Strangeite

Answer 1

Hi, Strangeite -
In addition to Tom's links above, some generalities -
• Free space on drives. On a boot drive running OSX, keep at least 5GB or 15% free (unused) space, whichever is greater. On a non-boot drive, keep at least 15% free space. This allows room for OSX to use its auto-defrag routines, and helps prevent directory or access issues which can happen when a drive gets too full.
• Backing up data. This should be done to a drive other than the boot drive - another internal drive, an external drive, a CD, etc. Partitioning the boot drive does not step around this - a partition of a drive is still physically part of the drive, which means that if the drive dies, so do all partitions of that drive.
If your data is very valuable, make redundant backups of it - such as to both another hard drive and to a CD. Backups are only as secure as the media they are on.
Setting up one of your additional hard drives as a backup boot drive is good planning - your machine is firewire bootable.
• Drive maintenance. Run a disk utility on a regular basis on all your drives - the sooner something is found and repaired, the less damage (loss of data) will occur. OSX's Disk Utility is good for this - although it can not fix everything, it has good diagnostics.
If you can afford both Alsoft's DiskWarrior and Micromat's TechTool Pro, get and use both. If only one fits your budget, DiskWarrior is a good choice.
• Physical.
Keep the machine reasonably dust free, and well ventilated. Heat is a killer; dust is an insulator. An accumulation of dust on fan blades can not only reduce the fan's speed, hence its cooling ability, but also stress the fan to early failure. Canned air, which can be got at places like Radio Shack, are good to blow out accumulated dust. Vacuum cleaners are not good - they are too powerful, and too capable of generating a lot of static electricity. Keep a couple of inches clearance around all sides of the machine, more in back - don't stifle cooling air flows.
Copper will slowly oxidize over time; copper oxide is not a good conductor of electricity. It would not hurt to break and remake cable connections annually or so, in order to keep the contacts in the connectors clean.
If your machine is critical to your life, keep some reasonable spares on hand - a spare mouse; a spare keyboard; perhaps some spare cables and hubs or equivalent. No sense being knocked out of use for lack of a low-cost item.