So who says Mac hard drives don't need to be defragmented for performance at least once in a while? This is my 1TB external raid I use for audio/video projects Note the big red region it has yet to defrag.

I got into setting up some Hazel file maintenance today. Hazel is a powerful app you can find at http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php

It was a good episode of http://macpowerusers.com/2010/04/mpu-025-geeking-out-with-hazel/ that got me going.

I have my audio work files on a firewire based raid mirror. As I am regularly doing the audio production for http://cyberspeak.libsyn.com/ disk space becomes a concern over time. Yet I want to keep all the files. So I whipped up a hazel rule set that compresses all audio related files to zip if they are older than the current month automatically.

I have included screenshots here. The key is the subfolders rule. It ensures all the files under the Cyberspeak show get handled. Yet I make sure to exclude my show template from soundtrackPro and some music etc files. I show the rule for AIF uncompressed audio which is just replicated for each of the large file types I am concerned about.

Lastly I also use Chronosync from http://www.econtechnologies.com/pages/cs/chrono_overview.html This lets my system automatically weekly sync over my entire audio production folder and file area to another hard drive across my network. This ensures I have copies of all my work on effectively three different hard drives. The two mirrored drives from the raid then a third drive across the house.

I have begun to be real pleased with the mac mini. It was the one I put a new drive and ram in. Then I loaded snow leopard.

Between iTunes and Hulu it has been great hooked to my tv. I do use my small apple Bluetooth keyboard with it. but instead of tying to use a mouse I have been using an iPhone iPod app I had for a while. It is called ipad. basically it makes my device a wireless touchpad similar to the one on my laptop.

I find the automation features in Mac OSX to be a lot of help.  Especially when whipping up a solution for someone else.  If you want to know more about how to work with automator and services check out these links.