Four eras: rebuilding the Desktop, repairing permissions, resetting Home permissions, and most recently cursing privacy protection. A cynical history?
rebuild
Why Spotlight can now take a long time building and updating its volume indexes. Understand when forcing them to be rebuilt is a good idea, and when it isn’t.
In Classic Mac OS, icons were determined by hidden databases. Here’s what we had to do periodically to keep them from breaking.
With Mac OS 8 and 9 back in 2001, we had to performance routine maintenance to keep the Desktop working. This is how we did it.
The Eclectic Light Company 