Automate file organisation on Mac
ONE OF THE downsides to Apple’s brave new world of technology is how much flash storage costs. For a long while, we revelled in massive hard drives, which reduced in price every year. Now, we live in an era of pricey SSDs. Additionally, Apple’s trying quite hard to nudge everyone towards storing their data on iCloud Drive.
The tiny snag is you only get 5GB of iCloud storage for free, which is shared among many of its services, not just iCloud Drive. Also, upgrading SSDs is expensive business and, in many cases, unfeasible. In short, we’re at a point where managing the files you keep on your Mac — and in cloud storage services — is a smart idea, unless you have the kind of overflowing bank account where money constantly begs to be spent.
There are, of course, pieces of software that will check through your Mac’s drive and show you some kind of graph to help you locate and delete huge files (Grand-Perspective being a free, usable and simple example). However, Hazel deals with cruft in a different way. Recognising that a lot of clutter is down to poor organisation, it offers a rules-based system for automating Mac housekeeping.
The way it works is by silently monitoring specific folders and running rules on them when relevant files are discovered. Said rules can be extremely simple — moving documents to their most suitable destination if you’ve just dumped them on the desktop — or you can delve deeper into complex rule sets, nesting conditions, adding tags and labels, creating archives, uploading content to servers and even running scripts.
TRY OUT HAZEL SAFELY
In the walkthrough below, we’ll start you off with some straightforward rules, so you can get to grips with Hazel. If you’re a little concerned about Hazel wreaking havoc with more complex rules, one tip is to try them on test folders. Create a Hazel folder somewhere in your user folder, add copies (not originals) of documents to it, and then run your rules to see what happens. (Also, back up. Always.)
Hazel will cost you US$32 (about AU$43) from noodlesoft.com. A fully functional trial version is available for download, which you can use for this tutorial. As far as we’re concerned, the app’s well worth the outlay and effort, for the time — and potentially even money — it’ll save you in the long run.
HAZEL SILENTLY CHECKS FOLDERS AND RUNS YOUR RULES ON ANY RELEVANT FILES THAT ARE ADDED TO THEM