Mac maintenance
Your End-of-Year Mac Cleanup Routine
Wrap up the year with a clean Mac. A practical December cleanup routine — reclaim storage, archive old projects, and start January fast.
December always sneaks up on me. One minute it’s October, the next I’m staring at a Downloads folder with 847 items, three half-finished design comps from a client who ghosted me in March, and a Mac that takes 40 seconds to open Mail. The end of the year is the perfect excuse to reset all of it.
This isn’t a deep-clean-everything-from-scratch routine. It’s the annual version — the one you do once a year so January starts on a clean slate. Block off 90 minutes, pour something warm, and work through it.
Step 1: Take stock of what 2025 left behind
Before you delete anything, get the lay of the land. Click the Apple menu, then About This Mac, then More Info, then Storage Settings. Wait for it to think.
You’ll see colored bars. The interesting ones:
- System Data (the big gray chunk that nobody can ever explain)
- Documents (probably bigger than you remember)
- Applications (every app you tried once and forgot)
- Trash (yes, really, you forgot to empty it)
Screenshot this page. Save it somewhere. After your cleanup you’ll want to compare — there’s something deeply satisfying about seeing System Data drop from 142 GB to 38 GB.
Step 2: Archive the year’s projects
This is the part most people skip. They either keep everything (Documents folder bloats forever) or delete recklessly (panic in March when a client asks for a file). The middle path: archive.
Make a folder called 2025-archive somewhere — external drive, iCloud, Dropbox, wherever you keep cold storage. Inside it, create subfolders by month or by client. Move:
- Completed client work
- Old project folders you haven’t touched in three months
- Tax-relevant documents and receipts (you’ll thank yourself in April)
- Screenshots from one-off projects
- Reference material you saved “just in case”
The rule: if you haven’t opened it since September and it’s not active, it goes to the archive. Don’t agonize. You’re not deleting it, just moving it out of the way.
Step 3: Empty the digital trash heaps
Most Macs accumulate the same five clutter pools. Hit them in order.
Downloads. Open Finder, hit Cmd+Shift+G, type ~/Downloads. Sort by Date Added. Anything older than 60 days is almost certainly trash — DMGs from apps you’ve installed, PDFs you read once, ZIPs you extracted. Multi-select, drag to Trash.
Desktop. That graveyard of screenshots and untitled folders. Same rule: move what you actually want to keep, dump the rest.
Old screen recordings. These are storage killers. Search Finder for .mov files larger than 100 MB. You’ll usually find a few abandoned ScreenFlow exports.
Apps you stopped using. Open Launchpad. Anything you don’t recognize or haven’t used in six months — uninstall. Dragging from Applications to Trash leaves leftovers in ~/Library/Application Support and ~/Library/Caches. A proper uninstaller cleans them up.
Mail attachments. Mail caches every attachment locally. After a year, this folder is monstrous. In Mail, go to Window > Activity, or just check ~/Library/Mail size. If you don’t need offline access to old attachments, in Mail Preferences > Accounts > Account Information, you can change “Download Attachments” to Recent or None.
Step 4: Tackle System Data (the gray monster)
System Data is where macOS hides everything that isn’t a clean category — caches, logs, kernel extensions, old iOS device backups, time machine local snapshots, mail downloads, Xcode derived data, browser caches, app support files. It can balloon to 100+ GB without you noticing.
The big offenders, in order:
- Time Machine local snapshots. macOS keeps local snapshots even if you have a Time Machine drive. They auto-purge under storage pressure but linger longer than you’d think.
- Xcode derived data and simulators. If you do any iOS development, this is usually 30–80 GB. Open Xcode > Settings > Locations > Derived Data and clear it. Also check
~/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices— old simulators take gigs each. - Browser caches. Chrome alone can hoard 5–10 GB. Safari and Firefox add more on top.
- iOS device backups. If you’ve ever plugged an iPhone into your Mac, there’s probably a 60 GB backup of an iPhone you don’t own anymore in
~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup. - App caches. Spotify, Slack, Discord, Adobe — every one of these caches aggressively.
You can hunt these manually, but the time-to-value ratio is brutal. A cleanup app pays for itself on this step alone.
Step 5: Photos library — the hidden swamp
Your Photos library probably has duplicates from screenshots, blurry burst photos, and a thousand pictures of receipts you photographed for expense reports.
In Photos, go to View > Hidden Album and clear stuff you actually want gone. Check the Recently Deleted album — Photos keeps deleted items for 30 days, so if you cleared 5 GB of photos two weeks ago, that 5 GB is still on disk.
For burst photos: select a burst, click “Make a Selection” in the toolbar, keep the keeper, delete the rest. Tedious but worth it on a year’s worth of bursts.
Step 6: Clean up the apps you actually use
Don’t just uninstall — clean up the ones you keep.
- Slack. Preferences > Advanced > “Reset Cache” and “Clear Cache.”
- Chrome. Settings > Privacy > Clear browsing data > All time. Cached images alone is usually 2–4 GB.
- Spotify. Settings > Storage > Remove all cached files. (Yes, you’ll re-download stuff. It’s fine.)
- Adobe Creative Cloud apps. Each one has its own cache pile. Photoshop’s scratch disk and Premiere’s media cache are giant.
- Music. If you stream Apple Music, delete the local downloads folder for any albums you don’t need offline.
Step 7: Empty the Trash (for real)
Sounds dumb, but most people forget this step. Right-click the Trash, Empty Trash, confirm. If you cleared 30 GB of stuff today and skip this, you cleared zero gigs.
Also: empty Photos’ Recently Deleted, empty Mail’s Trash on each account, empty Notes’ Recently Deleted, and empty the Downloads folder Trash (Finder has its own trash bin per Finder window in some workflows).
Step 8: Set up January for success
While you’re in cleanup mode, set up the systems that prevent this mess in 2026.
- Auto-empty Trash after 30 days. Finder > Settings > Advanced > “Remove items from the Trash after 30 days.”
- Optimize Mac Storage. Apple menu > About This Mac > Storage Settings > turn on “Optimize Storage” so Mail and TV media auto-purge.
- Stop Screenshots from cluttering Desktop.
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures/Screenshotsin Terminal (after creating that folder). Future screenshots go there instead of cluttering Desktop. - Schedule a monthly cleanup. Add a recurring 15-minute task to your calendar for the first of each month. Future you will thank past you.
Step 9: Compare and celebrate
Open Storage Settings again. Compare to your screenshot from Step 1. The difference is usually 30–80 GB on a Mac that hasn’t been cleaned in a year.
More importantly: the Mac feels different. Spotlight is faster because it’s indexing less. Time Machine backs up faster. Apps launch quicker. The fan kicks on less.
You don’t need to do this every month — once a year is fine for the deep version. But if you keep up with a quick monthly sweep, the December cleanup goes from 90 minutes to 15.
What not to do
A few things people do during end-of-year cleanups that backfire:
- Don’t manually delete files from
~/Library/Caches. Some apps misbehave when their cache disappears mid-session. Quit the app first, or let a tool handle it cleanly. - Don’t disable Spotlight indexing. Some guides suggest this. Don’t. Spotlight indexes once and uses minimal CPU after. Disabling it makes search useless.
- Don’t run “speed boost” tools that promise miracles. Most are scams. The genuine wins come from removing junk, not from magic.
- Don’t delete anything in
/System/. SIP usually blocks you, but if you find a way around it, you’ll brick your Mac.
That’s it. 90 minutes, a clean Mac, and a fresh start for January. See you in 2026.