Maintenance For Mac

While scripts can be used to perform various macOS maintenance operations, not everyone is familiar with or comfortable using them. There are lots of cleaning and optimization apps available, but they often charge money for simple functions that are already built into the OS.

Maintenance does its best to make some of these features available to everyone via a highly intuitive user interface. Its functionality is also contained in Onyx, but you can use this simpler app if you’re only interested in the specific features it has to offer.

To make sure it’s error-free, you can have the app verify the System and Data volume file structure. This will cause your Mac to become unresponsive initially, and it may take quite a long time to complete. If errors are detected, you will need to repair them via Disk Utility.

You also have the option to delete APFS snapshots before running the verification. This can speed up the process, but it can be time-consuming on its own.

If you choose to rebuild the Launch Services database, connections between files and applications that open them by default will be removed. This isn’t normally necessary, but it may be useful in some situations.

Rebuilding the Spotlight index is a fairly common maintenance operation when Spotlight stops working properly. Similarly, rebuilding the mailboxes index can help resolve issues with incomplete or missing messages.

You also have the option to delete stored positions of volumes on the desktop and delete .DS_Store files, which contain a folder’s custom attributes.

You have a lot more customization options for these functions. The app can remove maintenance scripts, cache files, junk items, libraries, saved application states, Xcode folders, cookies, downloads, logs, and more.

The default settings won’t normally remove anything important, but it’s worth going through them to make absolutely sure. The in-depth documentation will help you figure out what’s what.

There’s really nothing bad to say about Maintenance. It allows you to run some native cleaning and optimization operations without a command-line interface, and it is easily accessible regardless of your level of experience.