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The Mac maintenance checklist

Macs need far less maintenance than they used to. Most of the rituals people still perform, repairing permissions, running maintenance scripts by hand, defragmenting, are obsolete and do nothing on a modern macOS. What is left is a short, genuinely useful list. Here it is, organised by how often each task is actually worth doing, along with the things you can safely stop worrying about.

Updated 2026-08-02 · Written by the CleanerMac team · macOS 13–15 tested

Weekly: five minutes

These are the small habits that stop problems accumulating. None takes more than a minute.

• Empty the Trash. Files in the Trash still occupy disk space. Set it to empty automatically after 30 days in Finder, Settings, Advanced.
• Clear out Downloads. This is where installer disk images, duplicate PDFs and one-time attachments accumulate. Sort by size and delete the obvious.
• Restart properly. Closing the lid is not a restart. A genuine restart once a week clears leaked memory, flushes caches and applies pending updates. If you notice your Mac gets slower over a week and fine again after a reboot, this is why.
• Glance at Activity Monitor. Sort by CPU and by Memory. Anything unfamiliar at the top is worth investigating.
• Confirm your backup ran. Time Machine's menu bar icon shows the last successful backup. A backup you have not verified is not a backup.

Monthly: twenty minutes

The real cleanup pass. This is where most reclaimed space comes from.

1. Check storage. Apple menu, System Settings, General, Storage. Aim to keep at least 15 to 20 percent of the drive free, because macOS slows noticeably when it runs short of room for swap and caches.
2. Clear app caches. Everything in ~/Library/Caches is rebuildable, but do not clear the cache of an app that is currently open, which can crash it and lose unsaved work. Our cache guide covers the specifics.
3. Uninstall what you do not use. Dragging an app to the Trash leaves its caches, preferences, containers and login items behind. See uninstalling apps completely.
4. Hunt for large files. Old video exports, virtual machine images, forgotten archives. The large files guide shows the fastest ways to surface them.
5. Find duplicates. Photos imported twice, documents copied for safekeeping. Matching by content rather than filename is what catches the renamed ones.
6. Audit login items. System Settings, General, Login Items and Extensions. Every entry here costs you boot time and background memory.
7. Update your apps. Both the App Store tab and the apps that self-update.

Quarterly: the deeper pass

• Review System Data. This storage category quietly grows and is the one people find most confusing. Our guide to System Data storage explains what is inside it and what can go.
• Prune developer folders if you write code. DerivedData, old simulators and package caches are usually the largest single category on a developer's Mac. See the DerivedData guide, and run xcrun simctl delete unavailable after every Xcode update.
• Test a restore. Actually recover one file from Time Machine. This is the only way to know your backup works.
• Run First Aid. Disk Utility, select your volume, First Aid. It checks filesystem structures and fixes minor inconsistencies.
• Check battery health on a laptop, under System Settings, Battery, Battery Health. If it says Service Recommended, plan for a replacement.
• Clean the hardware. Dust in the vents raises temperatures, and heat is what throttles performance. A soft, dry brush with the Mac shut down — Apple advises against using compressed air.
• Review browser extensions. They are a common cause of both slowness and privacy leakage, and they accumulate without you noticing.

Yearly: the reset

• Decide on the OS upgrade. Waiting for the first or second point release of a new major version avoids the worst early bugs. If you do upgrade and things feel wrong afterwards, see Mac slow after update.
• Rotate your backup drive if you have two, and store one off-site.
• Confirm FileVault is on. System Settings, Privacy and Security. It is the foundation of securely deleting files and the only real protection if the machine is lost or stolen.
• Review what starts at login one more time, this time including background system extensions from antivirus, VPN and backup tools.
• Archive old projects to an external drive rather than carrying them on the internal SSD forever.

Only when something is wrong

These are troubleshooting steps, not maintenance. Running them on a schedule wastes time and, in the case of cache clearing, makes things temporarily slower for no benefit.

Things you can safely stop doing

Plenty of Mac advice is left over from an earlier era and persists because it sounds sensible.

• Repairing disk permissions. Removed in OS X El Capitan. System Integrity Protection manages permissions now, and there is nothing to repair.
• Defragmenting. Pointless on an SSD, and macOS handles fragmentation automatically on mechanical drives.
• Running the daily, weekly and monthly maintenance scripts manually. launchd runs them on its own, including catching up after the Mac has been asleep.
• Resetting PRAM or NVRAM routinely. A troubleshooting step for specific symptoms, not maintenance, and not applicable to Apple Silicon Macs in the old form.
• Installing antivirus for general protection. Gatekeeper, XProtect and notarization cover the realistic threats for most users, and heavyweight security suites are themselves a common cause of slowdowns.
• Clearing caches every week. Caches make your Mac faster. Clear them when you need space or when something is stale, not on a timer.

Automating the boring parts

The weekly list is habit. The monthly list is the one people skip, because it means visiting six different places in the system. CleanerMac collapses most of it into one pass: a storage breakdown that shows where the space actually went, cache and log clearing that skips open apps, a duplicate finder that matches by content, an uninstaller that removes leftovers by bundle identifier, and a Tune-Up tab with the troubleshooting commands from the table above as buttons. There is also a quiet scheduler if you would rather it just happened in the background.

Whether you use a tool or do it by hand matters less than doing it at all. A Mac that gets twenty minutes of attention a month stays fast for years. For the specifics behind each step, start with freeing up space and speeding up a slow Mac.

Turn the monthly list into one click

Storage audit, cache clean, duplicates and tune-up in a single pass.

Download CleanerMac — free for 3 days

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