What to Do When Your Mac Hard Drive has a Load of Duplicate Files

Perhaps, you get used to that snappiness your Mac trotted out on day one. As you start your journey with a brand new Mac, everything seems so freakishly fast. However, the same things begin to slow down with time. You can attribute this slowdown to the depleting free space on your Mac hard drive. The problems of insufficient disk space are caused by overwhelming volumes of data stored on the drive. One of the prime contributors to this is the presence of duplicate files. These duplicate files can cause a serious impact on your Mac's performance

You may not realize when your hard drive gets cluttered up with duplicate files unless your Mac turns out to be slower than a sloth. These data redundancies on your drive consume extra disk space that can cost you several GBs of storage (especially if the duplicates exists in the form of photos, audios, and videos). Duplicate files are created when you backup data on the same drive. This can also happen when you unknowingly download the same email attachment more than once. Another typical case could be you download the same software on different partitions of your hard drive.

Your hard drive may quickly run out of space and may even lead you to a potential disk crash. Undoubtedly, removing duplicate files from your system can benefit you in several ways. The first benefit is that you can reclaim sufficient amount of disk space and utilize this space for installing other useful programs on your Mac. The greatest advantage of getting rid of data redundancies is a dramatic increase in your system performance. Mac uses free space on the boot volume for paging and other system-related tasks. If the system partition has decent amount of disk space, your Mac will certainly run at its best.

With Mac OS X 10.4 or later, Apple provides an advanced search utility named 'Spotlight'. You can use this tool to find files, folders, and applications on your Mac hard drive. When you provide some text in the Spotlight search field, the utility displays all the occurrences of this text on your drive. This way you can search for duplicate files, and then delete them. If this sounds like a daunting task, you can go for professional duplicate file remover software. They can help you speed up the process of finding and removing all duplicates existing on your hard drive. Further, they also support the latest Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

Duplicate files in Mac Lion, Mountain Lion drive – find and delete

How the Duplicate Files in Mac OS X cause problems

If you think that you Mac is an athlete, you’re not alone. Your Mac machine was empowered to perform fast and be at the top in its class, and it keeps performing if it maintained properly. Like an athelete, a Mac performance can also slow down if they get burdened with excess of luggage.

Although the ways are different but both, the athelete and Mac, need to be freed from this extra burden. In Mac, the excess load is due to duplicate files (created either knowingly or unknowingly). In order to speed up Mac, you need to remove these duplicate files that are slowing down its performance.

Why Do Duplicate Files on Mac Hard Drives Matter?

Many of create multiple copies of same file and save them at various locations. We usually don't care about these duplicate data and keep the process going on untill there rises some issues with its speed. 
 
It is important to note that every duplicate file in your drive also duplicates in the amount of space it is taking to store. This means that having duplicate files on Mac computers hard drives could waste tremendous amounts of space, especially if they are a photo, music, or other large media files.

Whatever the case, you must find and remove duplicate files created in your Mac else, you will find yourself with a full hard drive, and your Mac will be lucky to crawl. Removing the duplicate files with a duplicate file finder, free space can be restored and once again your Mac will run better. 

Benefits of Deleting Duplicate data on Mac

Regaining free space on drive is one but not the only benefit of cleaning multiple copies of files. However, there more advantages of cleaning duplicate files on Mac, including eliminating the need for external backup space. Unfortunately, many Mac users who are not aware of these duplicate files spend too much after external hard drives to take the load off.

Another significant benefit of removing duplicate files on Mac, is that it can improve your Mac’s performance. Because of the now maximized space on your Mac’can have more memory available for the more important things. 

How to Remove Duplicate Files With a File Cleaner

You can call them anything either copies or dupes or doubles, files are unnecessary and you will need to take action to get your drive space back in tip top shape. Using a duplicate file finder Mac computer users can find all the duplicate files and delete them quickly, and painlessly.

Although the task of cleaning duplicate files can be done by searching through your hard drive manually, you may wish you hadn’t. But, the task is tedious and risk becasue while deleting these duplicate files you could accidentally delete the wrong one. Therefore, the best and most recommended way to find and delete files on Mac computers, is by using a Mac cleaner like Stellar Speed Up Mac.

Speed Up Mac with a hybrid drive | Hybrid drive Vs SSD Vs HDD

An SSD is considered as the king of the storage world. The SSD drives use flash memory and have nothing to do with any moving disks heads etc.. An SSD offers an incredible advantage over HDD and makes a huge improvement in your Mac performance.

Unfortunately, they’re also size-restricted and are still very expensive to afford. You can save some money by giving up some capacity.But, what if you don't want to fork over that kind of money, or if you’re not willing to compromise for the speed offered by an SSD?

Alternatives to increase Mac speed without compromising
The new Seagate’s Momentus XT “hybrid” hard drive seems the best solution to this issue. It combines a relatively-small 4GB SSD with a standard 500GB hard drive. From a user’s perspective, the SSD is hidden and it appears appears as a standard 500GB hard drive. The user can't access the SSD.

It is important to note that the drive’s firmware manages the SSD. It identifies the most commonly used disk sectors (not files) and move those bits to the SSD. The user can't notice the management or any change in drive's behaviour except an increased speed.

The hybrid drive makes and brings you the best of both - an SSD speed at HDD cost.
To analyze the performance of this drive in the real world we installed the drive in MacBook Pro and Mac mini. The result we noticed is as follows:

Seagate Momentus XT scores

	Photoshop CS5	HandBrake 0.9.4	CineBench R11.5 Graphics	CineBench R11.5 CPU	Mathematica- Mark 7	Parallels WorldBench Multitask test	Multitasking
15" MacBook Pro 2.66GHz Core i7 500GB 5400-rpm hard drive	58	422	16	160	5.8	361	77
15" MacBook Pro 2.66GHz Core i7 500GB Seagate Momentus XT	59	422	16	161	5.8	360	76

Tips for speeding up your Mac Lion | Speed Up trotting Mac

Many users who have switched from Windows PC to Mac, usually face a general maintenance issue. A specific question from one of our readers is:

“In order to clean up my PC drive, I used to format it and all the files, responsible for a slow PC, used to get deleted. It would run like it was brand new. Do I need to do the same with the my Mac? How to clean Mac drive and make it run faster.”

There are two answers for this question.
Ans1. No
Ans2. Never

                                 Mac                                                                      Windows

Mac Vs Windows

One should not throw the advice of formating Mac so casually. Although there are some Mac Lion users taking such a slash-and-burn approach. Instead, you might follow some easy tips and tricks to clean up all the dribs and drabs of cruft that slow down a Mac. In Windows the task can be done via a built-in disk cleanup tool but, in Mac there is no such feature.

1. Try to keep your desktop clean.
If your desktop is full of icons, you need to trim it down and keep the necessary ones only. Clean the unnecessary icons and keep those files by placing them in folders.

2. Restart your Mac every so often.
You can check how long your Mac has been running since the last reboot through a terminal command. All you have to do is launch Terminal ( /Applications/Utilities) and enter uptime.If it’s been trotting for weeks, restart it to flush out some old junk that’s slowing it down.

3. Check and Slim down useless contents of Mac drive
If your hard drive is nearly full, your Mac will run more slowly. Trash old files which you don't need any more.

4. Restarting browser and cleaning its cache.
Browsers are prone to slow down after running for a long time. If you find that your Web surfing has been reduced to dog-paddling, just stop the browser and restart it. Clearing the browser cache can also fix the issue to a very large extent. In Safari choose Safari -> Empty Cache. In Firefox choose Firefox -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Network and click the Clear Now button.

5. Reduce the list of login items.
Applications running in background can slow down your Mac. Go to System preference -> account ->Login Items. If you don't need everything then delete the unnecessary items.

6. Quit applications.
Per the last suggestion, it’s very easy to run multiple applications on your Mac. But perhaps there are more running than you need. Look in the Dock. If you see scads of applications with little blue dots beneath their icons (indicating that they’re active), quit those you aren’t planning to use in the near future.

7. Buy a faster (or different) drive
An SSD is much faster than an HDD, so, its recommended to go for a new drive and possibly an SSD. The readers should be aware of a new concept of hybrid drive, which we will bring in our next post.

Certainly. We have lots of helpful tips for speeding up Mac

Defragment Mac with Stellar Drive Defrag 2.5

 Stellar disk defrag is a wonderful Mac defragmenting software to rearrange the fragmented files and scattered free space in Mac disks. The tool software defrags the pieces of data and reallocates them in a contiguous memory locations which improves the rate of data access from disk.

Some unique and attractive features of the software are illustrated below:

Option Defrag specific large Mac Files
The user can browse upto a single specific large file and see the number of fragments, it is scattered in. Just select the file and start the process to allocate them nearby locations to reduce fragmentation and make data access smoother.

Stellar Drive Defrag

Organizes Free Space
An interactive GUI tells you everything about the amount of data and free space portions of free space available on your Mac drive and keep them at a single place to avoid fragmentation. This would in fact reduce the disk head movement and lead to a significant increase of your performance.

Full Defragmentation
This Mac defragmenting software accurately deals with everything present on the drive. It handles files, metadata, and free space. The software categorizes the disk space into various attributes, such as Allocation, Overflow, Catalog, Attribute, Fragmented, Data, and Unused Space.

Bootable DVD
An additional feature of this app is creating a bootable DVD, which can be used to boot your Mac machine and defrag the boot volume of your machine. The steps to create bootable DVD is mentioned at product's official website.

Block-Level Representation of Hard Drive Volumes
A extremely easy to understand disk status layout to display the entire drive as a group of individual blocks. These blocks are colored by examining the extent of information of the associated drive area .

Learn How OS X Keeps Your Mac in Control

Being built on rock-solid UNIX foundation and featuring a slew of robust technologies, Mac OS X provides you unparalleled stability and performance. Performance is the cornerstone of Apple's Mac OS X. It has built-in safeguards to keep you going even if you are indulged in intensive image editing or any other CPU-intensive task. Mac OS X takes care of hard drive fragmentation to keep your system running at its best with its original snappiness. However, fragmentation might become a concern over time when your OS X drive runs out of space. Lets us understand how fragmentation occurs and how Mac keeps you from facing serious slowdowns.

Fragmentation occurs due to continual creation and deletion of files on the hard drive. In the event that you delete a file, the file system reuses this space to store new data or changes made to other files existing on the drive. If you create a file that is larger than the one you have deleted, then it will be broken into multiple segments and these segments will be allocated non-contiguous blocks of memory on the fly. This results in file system fragmentation, which in turn impacts your system performance. A number of variables may affect your Mac's performance, such as size of files stored on the hard drive, random-access mechanisms used by the disk, the order in which files get segmented.

Mac OS X has built-in measures to reduce the amount of file system fragmentation. OS X’s HFS+ file system prevents filling small portions of free space created after deleting files. Instead, it groups a number of small allocations into a single large allocation for storing logically-related data contiguously on the drive. OS X implements another unique safeguard known as 'Hot File Adaptive Clustering'. With this technique, Mac OS X moves all frequently-accessed and read-only files to a special region of the hard drive. OS X performs automatic defragmentation of these files during the move. Further, if you open a highly fragmented file, OS X defragments it before it shows up on your Mac desktop.

Amidst all these techniques, there is a good chance that your performance decreases with time. It happens when the drive is more than 90% occupied or almost full. To overcome these problems, you should take help of professional hard drive defragmentation tools for Mac. Nowadays, such utilities are bundled together to form a comprehensive package of essential software for Mac, known as Drive Toolbox for Mac. This comprehensive package has a range of built-in tools for maintaining your Mac system, such as SpeedUp Mac, Drive Clone, Partition Manager, Volume Repair, and more.

How To Remove Duplicate Apps from Right Click menu in Mac OS X

In right click, the ‘Open With’ feature allows us to open the selected file with applications other than the one associated with it. Normally, it displays all the compatible apps which can open the ic file but sometimes, it offers duplicate apps in the ‘Open With’ menu.

Although its not a harmful bug but, sometimes it irritates and need the duplicate apps to be removed from ‘Open With’ menu.

 

Steps to trim duplicate apps

1. Open Terminal application.
   
   
   
   
2. Copy and paste the following code in Terminal, then press Enter.
   /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user  
   
   
   
   
3. After that, Go to Finder by holding down the Alt key and right clicking the Finder icon in the Dock, then click Relaunch.
   
   
   
   

That’s all you need to do. The above steps would result a trimmed ‘Open With’ menu. 

Click here to Delete Duplicate App from Mac OS X

Buy Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard DVD from Apple store for $19.99

One more chance to upgrade from Mac OS X Leopard to Mac Lion.
Once again the Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard DVD is available at Apple store. Mac users were really surprised with this move because the product was removed entirely from the online store. Earlier the price was $29.99 but this time it is available at $19.99 only.
It is the last Mac OS that could only be purchased on physical media. Since, Snow Leopard is required to run the latest versions of iTunes so the availability becomes more important from selling point of view.

For Mac users who were still planning to upgrade from Leopard to Lion, its a new chance to purchase Snow Leopard in order make this move because it won't be possible via any other technique. 

Apple Store

Sharing Tips to Step up Your Mac’s Performance

Your Mac has started freezing at times and it seems that it has turned into a retarded machine now. Normal copy operations take forever and make your system freeze almost intermittently. Applications stop responding during normal use and the system slows down noticeably. If this is a short tale of frustration that best describes your experience with Mac, then it’s high time to take some appropriate measures for getting back the lost momentum you loved on your brand new machine:

Fix File System Issues

You can always start your endeavour by fixing file system issues. This is typically the main reason for directory corruption and similar problems on Mac. Disk Utility will help you repair your startup disk and implement quick fixes to these problems.

Free Up Space on Your System Drive

The amount of free space on your Mac startup disk is indicative of how much the operating system can increase the size of swap file used for paging. When you are running low on hard drive space, your Mac will show up much degraded performance than before. In order to fix this, you should clean up Mac drive volume by uninstalling unwanted applications and trashing unnecessary files.

Repair Permissions

Corrupt disk permissions can be a pain in the neck as they can give rise to weird problems like application crashes, inaccessible files, and even slowdowns. You can repair permissions on system files and folders using the Apple’s Disk Utility. This can be your saving grace in the hour of need.

Check Your Dashboard Widgets

Some widgets on your dashboard may be of little or no use. These small applications take up huge amount of CPU resources while running behind the scenes and possibly drag down your Mac. To speed up your sluggish Mac, you should have a closer look at your dashboard and manage your widgets according to your need.

Fix Font Issues

Typically, a Mac loads all fonts in the memory regardless of whether they are used or unused. In order for optimizing your Mac’s performance, you should disable all the unnecessary fonts that are no longer needed.

If you fail to accelerate your old and retarded Mac using the above tips, take help of any robust commercial software to do the job. Nowadays, you can get a range of Mac utilities bundled in a single software known as ‘Drive Toolbox for Mac’. These software can help you optimize, repair, manage, and protect your Mac hard drives. Further, they support the latest Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

How to fix Mac Lion iCloud errors | Fix iCloud errors in Mac Lion

After upgrading your Mac OS X to Lion, you can access iCloud and store/access them via any of your Apple device. It sychronizes your Mac data without investing too much effort. But, sometimes Mac iCloud users face error stating “Apple ID is valid but is not an iCloud account”. Let’s see how to fix iCloud, Appstore and Facetime related issues on Mac Lion.

To fix the iCloud issue, we have an easy and quick method to solve the problem. Sometimes, it may fail and lead us to move towards another but difficult way.

 

1. Easy Solution

1. The user is required to move to /Extra and type the following lines in org.chameleon.Boot.plist. This can be done either manually or with an app like Champlist or Chameleon Wizard.
   

   org.chameleon.Boot.plist

   <key>EthernetBuiltIn</key>
   <string>Yes</string>

2. Chameleon revision is required to go above 1600, where the iCloud fix is included. The best method is to install Chameleon with myHack, then you are ensured that you have the latest version.
3. You need to have a ‘unique’ Serial Number in your SMBios.plist, located in the /Extra folder. You can add this lines manually:
   

   SMBios.plist

   <key>SMserial</key>
   <string>C02F3630DJD0</string> (example serial number)

   Or just generate a serialnumber with Champlist or Chameleon Wizard.
4. Reboot and pray!
   

If the above method doesn't fix the issue, you can move to the next one.

 

2. Fix iCloud (Difficult Method)

1. Go to “System Preferences > Network” and remove all your network devices. You will have internet acces until you complete this method. After deleting all external devices it should look like this.

   

   No Network devices attached

   
   
2. Type the following at org.Chameleon.boot.plist, located in the Extra folder.
   

   org.chameleon.Boot.plist

   <key>PCIRoot</key>
   <string>1</string>

3. Delete those files. These lines are available in Finder, via Go > Go to folder.
   /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/NetworkInterfaces.plist /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.network.identification.plist
4. Your machine needs to Reboot
5. Once your machine is started, you can add all your network devices again. Go to System Preferences > Network. Add FIRST your ethernet type and not your Wi-Fi!
6. Your iCloud is fixed and now you can anjoy all its features.
   

How To Make Safari Faster | How to speed up safari in Mac

How can I fix slow Safari? What can I do to improve safari speed ? These are some of the general queries being asked by Mac users who know that Safari is the default browser in Mac. It is taken as most fast performing browser and loads web pages faster. But, unfortunately, over time it may go slow.
Experts suggest some easy and quick tips to fix slow Safari performance. Some important ones are mentioned below.
 
1. Clean browser history and cache
Safari keeps information of all the sites you visit during an interval, in the browsing history folder. Over time, the size of this folder keeps growing and may even crash and affect the overall performance of Safari. You can easily clean history and cache to improve your browsing experience.
 
2. Reset Safari
When we reset safari, we empty the cache, clear all cookies, erase history and all the auto fill information. It restores our browser to the original settings deleting history, top sites and all the site preferences. It can be done via reset option in Safari menu.

Safari

3. Clear Safari Preferences
Deleting preferences can help safari to regain its speed. You can safely delete the Safari Preferences file because these are created every time you open an app. To delete Safari’s preferences Go to Finder > ~/ Library / Preferences and delete the file com.apple.Safari.plist.

4. Remove Safari Extensions which not required

The more number of extensions you have, the more complex your browser would be. So use extensions wisely, make sure to keep useful extensions only, and disable those which you don't use or you think may be causing speed issues.
You can manage extensions (enable or disable) in safari, from Safari’s preferences. To do so, open Safari’s preferences from the Safari menu and go to Extensions tab and turn off the extension you do not use.

5. Check for unwanted Plug-ins

Improper or crashed plug-ins can slow Safari down noticeably. The best approach to overcome such issues is to remove such plug-ins to speed up Safari. To remove a plugin go to Macintosh HD> Library>Internet Plugins>folder. Once the task is completed, relaunch the Safari. If your Safari is still running slow, it is suggested to install latest version of the brower.

How to speed up Mac with disk-related tune up

You can increase Mac OS X performance and make your Mac more responsive with certain disk level activities. Here we are discussing some ways to eliminate the typical hurdles from a smooth Mac performance.

 

Keep free space on startup drive

The free space on hard disk is used as an extension of physical RAM whereas there are many applications which use the hard disk as a scratch area. It is recommended to maintain adequate amount of free space on Mac drive because more the free space in your hard disk, the lesser the chance of your Mac struggling because of a lack of space so, you should keep at least 10GB of free space (after a restart) for normal usage. While running professional apps like Final Cut or Adobe CS2, you will need more free space.

 

Speed of hard drive matters

It may happen that despite of having an enough amount of free space in your drive, your Mac is run very slow. The issue could lie with the speed of your disk. If you are shopping for a new hard drive, get a drive with a low seek time and high spindle speed. The drives with speed of 7200 RPM or more, make good system drives. 

An intelligent Mac drive partitioning

Partitioning Mac drive can save your efforts. It is suggested to keep your system volume as big as possible. Many applications (particularly ones from Apple - such as Final Cut Pro) require to be installed on the system volume. The file system in OS X is too smart to maintain optimization and prevent massive fragmentation in Mac volume. This, in addition to optimizing your hard drive every so often, will help you get the best performance out of OS X. For a badly fragmented drive, Stellar Drive defrag is a nice option to improve Mac performance. 

How an additional hard disk improve Mac speed ?

Additional hard disk helps to enhance your Mac performance in a number of ways

1. When there are two drives in your machine, they share the load and it's like having a two lane highway instead of a single lane highway
2. While you use your second hard disk as the scratch disk for your editing app, if defragmentation causes any severe fall in performance, you can always 're-initialize' your second hard disk without much trouble.
3. A RAID association among drives, almost double the sustained data transfer rate due to data striping between the drives. Running RAID arrays as a secondary storage medium is a popular idea in professional editing studios since it maintains Mac speed and allows editing HD videos in runtime. Technically, it is not recommended to run RAID 0 as a primary boot array since it doubles the chances of data loss due to hard drive failure.