Use Apple’s Time Machine for one back up, but don’t stop there – create a second backup using either Carbon Copy Cloner ($40) or Super Duper! ($27.95) (both of which are excellent), and take a look at Crashplan as additional protection. Losing your images, music and other precious digital things is how almost every Mac user learns why they should back up.

Monolingual removes the international language support files installed by default on OS X, reclaiming several hundred megabytes of space. With over a million users, Disk Doctor ($2) is one of the very best disk cleaning utilities with numerous useful features – recommended. If you work and share files with Windows users you should ensure your Mac doesn’t infect the lesser platform. Mac users aren’t terribly impacted by viruses, but we can still pass them on. To help yourself use f.lux, which matches the color of your display to the time of day, filtering out that blue light at night. There’s a science at work here concerned with the blue light used for displays and its harmful effect on the brain’s sleep centers. We stare at our computers at work and at home, we use iPhones and iPads and then find we can’t get to sleep at night. Cleaner will also clean the disk and check for large files. Both will optimize your RAM to maximize available memory, while Dr.

Noticed how some applications consume so much RAM your Mac moves like a geriatric possum? One way to fix this is to relaunch the memory-consuming app, the other is to use Memory Clean or Dr. DiskWarrior is an insanely powerful recovery solution, but for basic file recovery all three work, including recovery of data from external drives. When things go wrong and you accidentally delete data or your hard drive fails then you’ll need Disk Drill, Data Rescue or DiskWarrior ( $119).

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