Start from scratch
The most extreme of cleaning options is to strip your Mac right back and effectively start again
The solutions we’ve
looked at so far for decluttering and cleaning your Mac have been fairly minor — the rough equivalent of a bit of dusting, or trashing old boxes that have been stacked in a corner for way too long. But there’s a more extreme option — the decluttering equivalent of “nuke it from orbit.”
We’ll now explore this course of action, which starts with beginning afresh, reverting your Mac to the equivalent of factory settings. After that, you’ll gradually build it back up to a workable state, restoring your documents, media, and apps.
Starting again
Although there’s a sense of busywork when peering into your Mac with GrandPerspective, starting from scratch is serious hard work. You can’t expect to finish a complete Mac refresh in an odd half-hour. Instead, you’re going to need to set aside a day or more of Mac time. It’s also going to be a dull, tedious slog, with a lot of waiting around.
You might then reasonably ask why you’d want to do this. What are the advantages? In what circumstances would this be considered a good idea? We can think of two. The first is when there’s something very wrong with your Mac, and you have no idea how to fix it. You may have tried repeatedly to get your Mac running smoothly, but it’s stubbornly resisting. This is rare, but low-level issues can occur after a Mac has accumulated the detritus of several years of use and updates. Installing apps, services, and hardware can take their toll.
The second reason is that it can be immensely rewarding to start again with a clean slate. Sure, you can delete the odd app you don’t think you need, but what about deleting all of them? And the same with files and data? You’ll then quickly find out what you really need (instead of just having stuff hanging around for the sake of it). As we’ve said, this is an extreme option, and not for the faint-hearted, but it can be an effective way to bring sanity and calm back to your Mac experience.
Before you begin, ensure you have at least two copies of anything important from your Mac. We have shown you how to back up your vital stuff in the past, and so we won’t go into depth here. But we strongly recommend making at least one full
clone of your Mac using Carbon Copy Cloner ($40, bombich.com) or SuperDuper! ($28, shirt-pocket.com/ SuperDuper), which will copy everything — apps, library files and documents. A separate Time Machine backup is a good idea, too. Also, if you’re not using iCloud, consider turning that on for your calendar, notes, and keychain.
On a blank USB flash drive (with at least 16GB of free space for macOS High Sierra), create a bootable installer. You’ll need a macOS installer from the Mac App Store, and Install Disk Creator (Free, macdaddy.io/install-disk-creator) or follow the steps at bit.ly/macos_ boot. Restart your Mac while holding Opt, and select the installer you just created. When the macOS Utilities window appears, select Disk Utility. Use the Erase feature to format your Mac’s usual startup disk as either APFS, if it’s a solid-state drive (SSD), or as macOS Extended (Journaled) with a GUID Partition Map scheme if it’s a hard drive or Fusion Drive.
Quit Disk Utility and install macOS from the macOS Utilities window, choosing your newly formatted drive as the destination. Once the process is complete, you’ll need to enter your Apple ID and other details.
Get your life back
At this point, you have all sorts of choices. You could copy across the contents of your entire user folder from a clone of your drive, or restore from the Time Machine backup. But a smarter move is often to restrict installation and copy just the things that it turns out you really need.
For example, rather than installing (from the Mac App Store and elsewhere) all your favorite apps, wait until you need one first — and consider whether you might already have something installed that could do the job instead. With your documents, copy across supporting files for current projects, but leave other old stuff on your backup drives unless it’s needed one day for reference or revival. That way, your Documents and Applications folders will be cleaner and simpler, far easier to manage, and take up less space.
It’s also worth noting that this can go hand-in-hand with cloud services. Sure, you could just copy your entire iTunes library back to your Mac — and perhaps you should, if you have many meticulously generated playlists. Alternatively, you could start using Apple Music or Spotify, massively reducing space usage, creating music collections that will sync across devices, and potentially discovering new music instead of listening to the same old stuff. After all, if you’re starting afresh with your Mac, there’s no reason why you can’t do so (to some extent) with your music.
Finally, a word of warning: take care of your backups. These will now be where your Mac “history” lives — not on your Mac itself. Be very careful to not overwrite them or damage them. Again, this is why making multiple copies of your documents — instead of relying on just one — is a very smart idea.