Notice that all of these maintenance tasks that we have been talking about in the previous articles only work when you do them in some regular intervals. One of the handiest feature of Windows operating system is its possibility to automate and schedule some of the maintenance activities that you had to do manually although this feature solely depends on the version of the Windows you are running. There are lot more to this but we will keep it short and show you two of the most common place that you need to strictly maintain and this article will teach you more about scheduling.
Windows task scheduler
You have Windows task scheduler in all of the modern Windows operating system. These is certainly under administrative task, so if you are not part of the administrative group or do not have any such elevated privilege, you need to leave this task to your admins.
One of the cool things with this is the fact you can take any executable program and set this to run at any given time. The key things to remember is that you need to know the name of the programs and any kind of switches you may need down the road.
The types of tasks you can manage with task scheduler
There are three categories of the task you can set for the task scheduler. The first one is a trigger, the second one is an action whereas the third one is a condition.
These basically are the pillars on which your set tasks will be run.
Trigger is something that will trigger this task to initiate its step. Actions are the sets of actions you want the program to run and conditions are some sort of logic you are laying out there for the task to complete its cycle such as telling the system, run a particular function of the program if the system is at sleep and so on.
How can you create your tasks with scheduler?
To create your first maintenance task, simply go to the search bar, type Task scheduler and this will bring up the task scheduler panel. At first glance all of these may look overwhelming but wait until your eyes and mind get adjusted to the newly popped up panel and then once you feel comfortable, go ahead and create a basic task.
This will immediately take you to the form where you will have to fill up the form accordingly. Note here you will see the trigger, actions and conditions as well. Once you are done setting them, you will find the new task in the listed box.
Note that on the left navigation you have folders and under Windows you have tons of sub-folders. Fun fact is, all the built-in automated task that your Windows make, they behind the scene use this task scheduler.
If you go ahead and explore, you will see tons of presets laying there in each of these folders. One thing to take note of, for instance, if you wanted to modify the disk defragmenter which is already a built-in task, you need to go the disk, properties, tool tab and optimize drive. There you will need to select the desired configuration you want to make by hitting the change settings button.
Task scheduling on other popular systems
As for the macOS and Linux users, both of them use two kinds of scripting tools to automate all these tasks.
For Apple it is called launched and for linux it is called cron and it had been like that for linux since the beginning. To write such a script, this is a way beyond the scope of this article as you need to have programming knowledge and geeky techy stuff like that.
Yet, do not worry much about how you are gonna automate these disk maintenance task on macOS. Every macOS comes in with a preautomated task which runs every night and scan your disks health. Upon finding any error or such, either it will fix it or leave it until you log in again the next time.