How often do you clean up your Mac?

[tosslobbs]

Hi guys,
I used to reformat my PC’s hard drive monthly to clean out all the files that slowed it down. Then it would run like it was brand new. How often do I need to do that with the Mac?

[justperry]

Never, not needed on OS X, OS X does NOT slow down unlike Windows.

I went all the way up from 10.0 b to 10.8 without ever reinstalling.

[benwiggy]

Originally Posted by tosslobbs

to clean out all the files that slowed it down.

There are no such files in OS X.

Normally, your Mac should run fine and not need any regular preventative maintenance. There is no reason that OS X will degrade its performance over time, or as the result of accumulated files.

I would concur that reinstalling is rarely necessary, unless you have deleted or modified some essential system files. Otherwise, nearly every problem is solvable without reinstalling the OS.

Also, I would stay away from any "cleaning" apps that are often advertised, as they are at best unnecessary and at worst, harmful.

If you do get problems with your Mac, there are a number of things you can do to restore performance, most notably emptying the caches. A corrupt cache might cause slowness.
Note that caches should not be regularly emptied, as the whole point of a cache is to speed things up.

Originally Posted by tosslobbs

I used to reformat my PC’s hard drive monthly

Wow. Welcome to OS X. I'm surprised your hard drives didn't fail after a couple of years of doing that.

[Drew017]

The only thing I'd recommend doing is cleaning the caches out every month or so. You can download Onyx which is a maintenance app for Mac. Anything else is kinda unnecessary IMO

[bobr1952]

Originally Posted by Drew017

The only thing I'd recommend doing is cleaning the caches out every month or so. You can download Onyx which is a maintenance app for Mac. Anything else is kinda unnecessary IMO

I started using this last month and really like it. I never really felt the need to clean out cache on my iMac--and although I have plenty of storage on my rMBP--256GB of storage is certainly not unlimited and so cleaning up on a regular basis is not such a bad thing. Onyx is quite a nice little product.

[benwiggy]

Originally Posted by Drew017

The only thing I'd recommend doing is cleaning the caches out every month or so.

Originally Posted by bobr1952

cleaning up on a regular basis is not such a bad thing.

There is NO need or advantage from emptying caches on a regular basis. As said earlier, the whole point of caches is to speed things up. Emptying them will slow down your machine and impair performance.

Onyx is an excellent utility, but I would wait until you get a problem before running its various tasks.

[w0lf]

Originally Posted by benwiggy

There is NO need or advantage from emptying caches on a regular basis. As said earlier, the whole point of caches is to speed things up. Emptying them will slow down your machine and impair performance.

I'll second this, cleaning your cache is just going to slow things down, not speed things up.

Honestly there is really no need to perform maintenance before the fact, most of the time you'll just end up doing more harm than good.