I Am "They"

04.03.06 | Apple

John Gruber posted his opinion about the non-benefits of repairing permissions before and/or after doing a system upgrade on his site, Daring Fireball, today.

While I do agree with him that repairing permissions is a troubleshooting tool, and shouldn’t necessarily be part of a regular maintenance plan, I am a firm believer that repairing permissions before any kind of major update to your system (before backing up, of course) is a huge benefit. Personally, I would rather lose a few extra minutes repairing permissions than I would losing 30 or more by having to go back after the fact and sort out issues which arise after performing an update.

I say this because I know from first hand experience dealing with non-Apple application installers (namely Adobe CS1 & 2) that they can wreak havoc on system permissions which don’t necessarily pop up until after you’ve done an Apple system update. If you’re not a technically inclined user, which do you think is going to be easier to deal with? Repairing permissions using a silly little utility app before hand, or trying to figure out why some program suddenly isn’t working, and resorting to reinstalling the whole application suite because you don’t have the technical know how to do anything but exactly that? I prefer the “preventative” maintenance route myself.

While John states that Apple “does not recommend that you do this,” I’ve never seen anything from Apple which publicly says so. Just because they don’t say anything, certainly doesn’t mean they’re saying “don’t.” I’d also like to point out that Apple does in fact provide a couple of publicly available tech info articles (106712, 25751) about what permissions are, what kind of things can cause issues with them, and how to deal with them.

So, John, you can call me a “they” if you like (I can almost smell the disdain). I’ve been in the habit of repairing permissions before every major system upgrade since 10.1, and I’ve never had any issue with my personal systems, or the forty-seven I help manage for my day job. Oh, and yes, I’m one of those morons that download the combo updater too. I don’t know, there’s just something about having complete control over my update that makes me feel safe, I guess. For the record - Apple does state that there are benefits to downloading the stand alone updater. Donning my preventative maintenance hard hat again, I would rather lose a few minutes up front in download time (I have a fat pipe - I can do it), than potentially losing an hour or more after the fact trying to sort out obscure issues.

These are, of course, only my opinions on the topic. If you talk to some other Mac head on the street corner, he’ll tell you both Gruber and I are insane and that all you need is a good mojo, a black cat bone and a picture of Steve Jobs. I don’t think there’s any one absolute “right” way of keeping a system healthy. If it works for you, and you’re comfortable with how it works, then stick with it.

And the debate rages on…