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Beyond disk space

Maintenance jobs

Seven jobs macOS can do but does not put a button on. Each one is measured against your Mac before it is offered, and none of them touches your files.

Nothing runs until you press Run. Several ask for your administrator password — that prompt is macOS's own, and the app never sees what you type.

The maintenance screen: malware protection and memory purge shown as measured status rows with no Run button, then rotate and compress logs, thin local snapshots, flush the DNS cache and rebuild the Open With list, each with a Run button and a note on what it costs.
One Mac, 25 September 2026

The seven

  • Rotate and compress logs. Gzips the system logs that are due. This is where the space is.
  • Thin local snapshots. Time Machine keeps hourly snapshots on the startup disk while the backup drive is away. It tells you how many exist and how much is actually purgeable first — often none, because snapshots macOS made for an OS update are not purgeable and stay. You lose the ability to roll back to those points without your backup drive.
  • Flush the DNS cache. The fix when a site still resolves to an address it has moved off. The first visit to each site afterwards is a fraction slower.
  • Rebuild the Open With list. Clears deleted apps and duplicate entries out of the menu, and out of which app opens what.
  • Compact Mail's index. Rewrites the envelope database, which grows and never shrinks. Mail has to be closed.
  • Rebuild the Spotlight index. For a Mac whose search has stopped finding things. It takes a while and the Mac is busy while it runs.
  • Check the startup disk. Verifies the volume and reports. It does not repair.

The two it will not give you, and the two it cannot

Four more appear on the same screen, listed with the reason and no Run button. Two are things every rival ships:

  • Run the periodic maintenance scripts. macOS no longer ships the periodic command at all — there is no /etc/periodic and no launch daemon for it. Log rotation moved to newsyslog, which is the first job above.
  • Repair disk permissions. macOS has protected and repaired system file permissions itself since El Capitan. There has been nothing for that button to do for ten years.

The other two are the memory purge and the malware scan, which are measurements here rather than buttons. Each has its own page: CPU and memory and malware protection.