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Modern versions of Mac OS X no longer need you to repair disk permissions. However, that’s not the only issue that can occur with a disk or file system. Mac OS X contains a variety of tools for repairing disk, partition, and file system errors.
These options work like chkdsk on Windows, checking for disk and file system errors and repairing them. You can perform a check from within Mac OS X, but it may sometimes be necessary to use recovery mode to fix problems. In a worst-case scenario, you may have to manually run fsck commands from a terminal in single-user mode.
Use “First Aid” in the Disk Utility
You can perform a disk health check from the Disk Utility application included with Mac OS X. Apple updated this utility’s interface on Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan, so it’ll look a bit different from the screenshots below if you’re still using and older version of Mac OS X.
To launch it, you can press Command+Space to open Spotlight search, type “Disk Utility”, and press Enter. Or, you can navigate to your Applications folder, double-click the “Utilities” folder, and double-click the “Disk Utility” shortcut.
In the Disk Utility application, select the disk or partition you want to check — the system partition is named “Macintosh HD” by default — and click the “First Aid” button.
You can either run the First Aid function on an entire disk, or an individual partition on that disk. It depends which you select in the sidebar.
Click “Run” and your Mac will check the disk you selected for errors. If it finds any errors, it will attempt to automatically fix them for you.
You can click the “Show Details” drop-down message to view detailed information about any errors it encounters. You’ll see messages like “Storage system check exit code is 0” and “File system check exit code is 0” here. An exit code of “0” is a good thing, and means no errors were found.
Boot into Safe Mode
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One simple way to fix such errors is to boot your Mac into Safe Mode. Safe Mode, sometimes called “Safe Boot,” contains an automatic startup check and repair that can fix these problems.
To do this, restart your Mac and hold “Shift” while it’s booting. Sign in with your password and your Mac will then check your disks. This will make the login process take longer than normal, so be patient.
When it’s done logging in and you see a desktop, the disk check is done. You can reboot your Mac at this point.
Run First Aid in Recovery Mode
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Ideally, that should be the end of it — especially if you used the safe mode trick above. However, in some cases, your Mac may find disk or file system problems and be unable to repair them when you perform the above steps. This is because it’s running in “live mode” — examining the disk while the operating system is running from it. It can’t make changes to that system drive while it’s running from it.
The solution is to boot into a special recovery mode. From there, you can use Disk Utility in the same way. Your Mac will be able to fix errors on your system drive from recovery mode.
To do this, restart your Mac. Press and hold the “Command+R” keys while it’s booting. You’ll see a progress bar appear, and you can release the keys after you do. Your Mac will load straight into recovery mode. (If recovery mode doesn’t appear, restart your Mac and try pressing the keys again.)
In OS X Recovery, click the “Disk Utility” shortcut to launch the Disk Utility here. Select the drive or partition you need to repair and click the “First Aid” button. The Disk Utility interface is the same one you’ll see on your Mac OS X desktop, but run it from here and it’ll be able to repair problems with your system drive.
Use fsck in Single-User Mode
In some cases, even Safe Mode or Disk Utility in OS X Recovery won’t be enough to fix problems. You may need to boot your Mac into single-user mode and run the fsck (file system check) command the old-fashioned way. You don’t need to do this if any of the above steps worked. This is the thing you should try last, as Disk Utility in the recovery environment may work better and be more capable.
To do this, start your Mac in single-user mode. Restart it, and then press and hold the Command+S keys while it boots.
You’ll enter single-user mode, which will provide you with a text-mode terminal. Type the following command into the terminal and press Enter to start a file system check:
/sbin/fsck -fy
The command will run through several phases of checks. When it’s done, you’ll see a message saying “** The volume [name] appears to be OK” if everything is fine.
If it found problems, you’ll see a “***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****” message. This indicates the fsck command found and fixed problems. The fsck command may find additional errors after repairing the first batch of errors, so Apple recommends you run the fsck command again if it found and fixed problems. Run the above fsck command over and over until you see a “** The volume [name] appears to be OK” message.
When the fsck command says your disk is okay, type the following command at the terminal and press Enter:
reboot
Your Mac will reboot, returning you to the usual login screen.
The above steps should only be necessary if you’re experiencing errors with your Mac. Assuming everything is fine, you don’t need to regularly perform disk first-aid checks. However, if you do want to run a check, you can just do it with Disk Utility from within Mac OS X. You don’t need to reboot into any other environments unless there’s an error on a system drive you need to fix.
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Duplicate files are a waste of disk space, consuming that precious SSD space on a modern Mac and cluttering your Time Machine backups. Remove them to free up space on your Mac.
There are many polished Mac apps for this — but they’re mostly paid software. Those shiny apps in the Mac app store will probably work well, but we have some good options if you don’t want to whip out your credit card. Better reformating tool for usb on mac.
Mac Osx Tool To Search For Files Containing Text
Gemini and Other Paid Apps
If you do want to spend money on a duplicate-file-finder app, Gemini looks like one of the best options with the slickest interfaces. The trial version worked well for us, and the interface certainly stands out from barebones, free applications like dupeGuru. Gemini can also scan your iTunes and iPhoto library for duplicates. If you’re willing to pay $10 for a better interface, Gemini seems like a good bet.
There are other, similarly polished duplicate-file-finders in the Mac App Store, too — but Apple flags this one as an Editors’ Choice, and we can see why.
As a bonus, the demo version of Gemini allows you to search for and find duplicates, but not remove them. So, if you really wanted, you could use the demo to find duplicates on your Mac, locate them in Finder, and then remove them by hand. Other paid duplicate-file-finder apps have demos that function in a similar way, so this may be convenient if you just want to run an occasional scan and you don’t mind deleting a handful of duplicates by hand.
There are many good-quality, paid duplicate-file-finding apps for Mac. You can find them with a quick trip to the Mac App Store.
dupeGuru, dupeGuru Music Edition, and dupeGuru Pictures Edition
RELATED:10 Ways To Free Up Disk Space on Your Mac Hard Drive
We also recommended dupeGuru for finding duplicate files on Windows. This application is both open-source and cross-platform. It’s simple to use — open the application, add one or more folders to scan, and click Scan. You’ll see a list of duplicate files, and you can select them and easily move them to the Trash or another folder. You can also preview them, verifying that they actually are duplicates before tossing them away.
dupeGuru is available in three different flavors — a standard edition, an edition designed for finding duplicate music files, and an edition designed for finding duplicate pictures. These tools won’t just find exact duplicates, but should find the same songs encoded at different bitrates and the same picture resized, rotated, or edited.
This application is utilitarian, but it does its job well. You don’t get the shiny interface that you do with the paid Mac apps, but it’s a good free tool for finding and clearing duplicate files. If you want a free application for finding and removing duplicate files on a Mac, this is the one to use.
iTunes
iTunes has a built-in feature that can find duplicate music and video files in your iTunes library. It won’t help with other types of files or media files not in iTunes, but it can be a quick way to free up some space if you have a big media library with duplicate files.
To use this feature, open iTunes, click the View menu, and select Show Duplicate Items. You can also hold the Option key on your keyboard and then click the Show Exact Duplicate Items link. This will only show duplicates with the same exact name, artist, and album.
After you click this, iTunes will show you a sorted list of duplicates next to each other. You can go through the list and delete any duplicates from your computer if they actually are duplicates you want to delete. When you’re done, click View > Show All Items to get back to the default list of media.
Mac Osx Tool To Search For Files By Size
That’s it? Yup, that’s it. We didn’t want to recommend potentially confusing Terminal commands that output a list of duplicates to a text file, awkward methods that involve scrolling through a list of all the files on your Mac in the Finder, or applications that require disabling the Mac’s Gatekeeper feature to run untrusted binaries. The tools above will do the job, whether you want a barebones-and-free utility or a polished-but-paid application.
Mac Osx Tool To Search For Files By Date
Mac Osx Tool To Search For File Extension
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