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I don't need to clean up my desktop and downloads folders in macOS (2021) (stefanjudis.com)
62 points by ingve on May 29, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 74 comments



So to solve my problem I just have to do the mental effort I'm avoiding in the first place?

My strategy is simple, I fill with my computer with crap until I decide I want a fresh start.

Then I back up these folders to a backup/year/month folder and never open them again.

But if I ever need that meme from 2013, maybe I'll find it.


And here I thought I was the only one.

At first I just moved everything into a folder named "old" that sat in the same place, and eventually probably wound up having 20 or 30 recursive folders all named "old".

It wasn't until after probably a decade of that I had the big-brain moment to actually bother labeling them by month+year and put them all at the same level in an explicit backup directory...


I, too, subscribe to the 'shove all my crap into my bedroom closet when told to clean my room' method of computer janitoring.

Ironically enough I have a folder on my desktop called "Sorted" that I just drag things into when I haven't used them in a while. Gotta love the search function, else I'd never find anything in the rare case that I do need it.

Comes in handy sometimes however, like having the installers for every major version, patch and RC of an indie game going back a decade, or old editions of a minecraft or skyrim mod that the author may have pulled offline in some hissy fit or another.


Parallel evolution: not on MacOs, place everything on desktop () and move it into backup folder (usually just something like 2023mei29) if the desktop becomes too unmanageable. Happy to read this solution has been thought of by others as well


Are you me ? :p


I call that folder "glacier" named after the AWS product with the same tradeoff: easy writes in exchange for harder reads. I also have a physical "glacier" bin in my closet and drawer in my desk.

It's surprisingly easy to reliably remember that I would have put something in the "needed infrequently when I'm willing to spend a few minutes looking for" drawer.


I like the extra purge version of this - Exact same idea, except you also re-install the OS fresh.

I used to do it once a year, but I'm down to once every other year now. Backup folders get the machine name & year, and put on dropbox/drive/nas/other.

Entire machine is wiped, OS is installed, everything feels so fresh and sparkly. It's a bit like going to the dentist - not exactly fun, but you feel very clean for a bit afterwards.

Really helps also wipe out all the other accumulating cruft you just don't have the time or energy to go delete.


On MacOS reinstalling the OS 'from fresh' doesn't really do anything any more because the OS is installed to an immutable sealed volume. Reinstalling the OS is basically a no-op.


I consider volumes local to the device as something that gets wiped on OS reset, although I definitely understand the confusion.

I'm not just wiping root and leaving home/mail/etc alone. I'm wiping and re-partitioning the local drive.

The partition layout on macOs is fairly complex - on those machines it would be comparable to "Erase all contents and settings" option, but also with a refresh of the immutable OS to the latest released revision (Not always the case on macOS, depending on your recovery drive configuration).

---

That said, I don't buy Apple products for personal use - they're far too hostile to their users for me to give them money, and I was always a "function over form" kinda guy in the first place, which is not Apple's market. Apple is the chauffeured car of the computer world... Smooth, Expensive, Hands-Off. I don't always want to drive manual, but I'm not willing to give up the steering wheel... so windows, linux, and bsd for me. Although lately, less and less Windows.


Though they're easily removed without a reinstall, it'll clear out things like startup apps and background daemons. Kernel extensions (which should be rare already, but still exist) will also get wiped.


The OS files itself may be immutable, but you’re still wiping your user data, all installed software, and other clutter stored in writeable locations.


I've been doing the same for over a decade (closer to 15 years) at this point, except instead of a folder I just create an image of the drive of the computer I'm backing up. The only problems are that navigating old backups to find things is starting to become a chore and duplicates abound. I think the next time I have a bunch of time to myself, maybe between jobs or something, I'm going to take a couple hours each day for a few days to organize it all for better accessibility.


You’re not alone! I had developed a habit of cleaning downloads and files since storage was somewhat scarce when I started using PCs in the 90s. Now it’s so cheap that I will simply delete very large files, then name the folder yyyy-mm-dump and place it with others in a backup folder somewhere. If I ever have to recove disk space I will glance over and delete it then, but more often it has been more valuable to dig up some meme or image.


This is the way. Do you follow the same approach with email? I'm sitting on 110k emails in my inbox and pondering my options.


I delete every e-mail I won't need.


Archive everything


Even easier: have a parent folder that holds all the folders/directories containing every piece of data you want to keep. Once you do your fresh start, transfer that folder over, and say to hell with the rest, after a quick scan for the 5 items you actually do want to keep


Me too. Moving them to an "archive" folder I will never open solves the anxiety problems of deleting something I will never look at again.


Same here. I backup once per year. No organization effort required.

Any info I need to retrieve can be found by searching for filenames or the various file metadata.


Re-discovering your memes from 2013 is as pleasant of a nostalgia trip as seeing photos of your friend from college.

It's a time machine for your feelings.


same, but instead of backup, I just delete the biggest unimportant files. I can last for years doing that, until I change Linux distro, new laptop, or just a fresh install


Yep, in terms of just getting storage back I just simply run `ncdu` once a year and go for it.


AIf you named it anywhere sensible, otherwise 1000s of .jpgs


There was a time when I mounted ~/downloads as a tempfs. After a day of work, all files that I didn’t put in their supposed location, got cleaned up.

Now, I have a much simpler approach: whenever I touch a file, I'll put it into the right location. The downloads folder is mostly empty.

Same principle in real life. Things have have their designated place and they go back there after use.

Clutter simply doesn’t exist in my life.


Is this what it's like to not have ADHD?


I don’t know. Might also be like having ADHD because it’s a way of reducing stimuli.


You can add your download folder to $daily_clean_tmps_dirs in /etc/periodic.conf and files not accessed for three days will automatically be deleted. See /etc/defaults/periodic.conf and /etc/periodic/daily/110.clean-tmps


Deleting every reboot sounds a bit aggressive. I used to have a .sh script in a cron job that would move downloads to a separate folder after 48 hours, keep them there for 3 months, then delete them permanently. A couple loops and some mtime checks.

Abusing /tmp sounds fun as well tho.


I found turning off the Desktop to be helpful:

  defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false && killall Finder


I do this on my Macs. Windows and KDE also have the option. GNOME stopped doing desktop icons by default ages ago. It's such a better experience IMO.

I have Desktop added as one of those fan-out folders in the MacOS Dock so it's really easy to drag-n-drop the newest screenshot to GitLab etc.


I did something similar: make the Desktop read-only. Handy if you still want things on it


Nice. Does this persist after upgrades?


Yep. I've been doing this for years. It changes a plist file in your home dir somewhere if I remember correctly.


I've been fighting with the automatic accumulation of downloads for years now - it really makes it impossible to figure out if whatever I downloaded can safely be deleted - so my current system is similar to the OP's one, but a little gentler: I have a launchd task that runs every day and warns "I'm about to delete these things that are older than two weeks", which lets me salvage anything I might have forgotten to archive.

Source here in case it's useful for anyone: https://github.com/f-f/home/blob/ee0ae5dd201ac6e8ffa60fff71b...


Changing the screenshot settings to make copying the image to your clipboard is good advice, it's one of the first things I do on a new Mac. I take maybe half a dozen screenshots a day, and the workflow is almost always pasting them into Slack or Jira; I don't need my OS to save a local copy on my desktop.

I'm not sure I get the advantage of putting things into a tmp directory. If I have to move things out of there to avoid them being deleted automatically, that seems like about the same amount of work as just archiving important downloads and then deleting everything in ~/Downloads once in a while. And safer too. By that logic, you might as well just save your downloads in the Trash.


My downloads folder is my to-do stack, I sort it by oldest items and process each one, either organizing or deleting stuff. Whether I need to read some document, watch a movie, or install something I'll put it in downloads. If the system allows I'll set Downloads as home folder when starting the file browser.


I have a healthy mixture of organized folders, like official documents by years for example and disorganized folders.

The key to happiness is to accept the mixture, also accept that you sometimes rename and reorganize stuff, that that sometimes makes it better and sometimes makes it worse, and that sometimes thinking about all of this is just procrastination, but sometimes it's not!


These are clever strategies!

I'm too lazy to move things out of ~/Downloads, so I've just started using the folder as my default working directory and struggle to clean it out every quarter or so. /tmp (or probably ~/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems for my account only) being cleaned out on every reboot would force me to be more intentional.


I collapse the crufty locations down onto my desktop. It doesn't really stop me from treating it that way, but it means there's only one place to clean up, and creeping icon sprawl eventually forces me to deal with it semi-regularly (instead of letting it slide until it's time to wipe the device...):

    $ ls -ld ~/{Desktop,Documents,Downloads}
    lrwxr-xr-x    1 abathur staff   24 Apr 19  2020 /Users/abathur/Desktop -> /Users/abathur/Downloads
    lrwxr-xr-x    1 abathur staff   24 Apr 19  2020 /Users/abathur/Documents -> /Users/abathur/Downloads
    drwx------+ 233 abathur staff 7456 May 29 13:56 /Users/abathur/Downloads


yeah. anything I can just redownload later I shove in downloads, anything I create or can't likely be redownloaded easily goes to documents


I kind of like digging through the downloads folder every year or two though and seeing all the things I had done and explored.

I copy anything useful to a NAS and then delete the rest.


This is a lot of steps for what’s essentially just a cronjob

@reboot rm -rf /Users/me/Downloads/*

Throwing away _all_ downloads / items on the desktop is not the hard part. The hard part is deciding if there’s any wheat in with the chaff.


It's the big files that take up most space so delete those and ignore the others due to the law of diminishing returns.


This is similar to what i do.

Nowadays, storage is cheaper (though of course not free), so whenever i download BIG files, i review to see if said file is worth saving...If it is, then i promptly move it intop a relevant directory. If not worth saving, then i delete it. As an example, I do this alot with ISO files for Linux distros. Sometimes i download it, copy it to a usb thumb drive, try out the linux distro, and then delete it. Now, if downloaded BIG files so often, then i guess this method won't scale...but for me, its a solved issue.


First thing I do on a new mac is change the settings to save screenshots to ~/Desktop/Screenshots. Takes ten seconds and pays off for the rest of the time you use that Mac.

cmd-shit-5, then options.

More details: https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-change-the-screensho...


oh wow didn't know you could do that. thank you!


For me all downloads go to the desktop, once used/done it gets removed/moved. It's like a to-do list with icons.


Same, Temp folder on desktop move to after done and periodically review / empty.


Less of an issue with modern computers, but items on the desktop take more resources than anywhere else. It used to be that people who couldn’t see the background under the icons also had a lot of paging and frame drops.


I'm very happy with my system: I have ~/tmp/ with subdirs `hour`, `day`, `week`, `month`, `6months`, `2years`. Files in each of these get removed by a cronjob x time after they were created/modified (i.e. after an hour; a day; etc).

  */10 * * * * /usr/bin/find ~/tmp/hour/ -mindepth 1 -mmin +60 -cmin +60 -delete
  0    * * * * /usr/bin/find ~/tmp/day/ -mindepth 1 -mmin +1440 -cmin +1440 -delete
  # etc
Files in ~/Downloads/ are deleted in the same way, after 2 hours. If I download something that I want to keep "forever", I move it to where it belongs. Anything that is not "forever" goes into one of the ~/tmp/ subdirs (with a useful filename so I can trivially find it when I need it). You get into the habit of moving things out of ~/Downloads/ very quickly, and it's not very painful: downloaded things can almost always be re-downloaded if you forgot to move them.

I used to have another (crude) cronjob to warn me before deleting files:

  0 21 * * * (/usr/bin/find /Users/me/tmp/week/ -mindepth 1 -mtime +5 -ctime +5; /usr/bin/find /Users/me/tmp/month/ -mindepth 1 -mtime +28 -ctime +28; /usr/bin/find /Users/me/tmp/6months/ -mindepth 1 -mtime +183 -ctime +183) | /usr/bin/sed 's/^.Users.me.tmp.//g' | /usr/bin/mail -E -s "will delete some ~/tmp files soon" me@domain
... but I found it unnecessary. In practice, I just take some margin in deciding where to put things. If I think I'll need it for max a week, I'll put it in tmp/month to be on the safe side, etc. And worst case, I can just retrieve it from my backups.

I can't recommend a system like this enough. It feels like "inbox zero" for your filesystem; very liberating.


Incidentally, while /private/tmp is a cesspool of random detritus created by whatever process chose to abandon it there, identical daily clean-up behavior (implemented by /etc/periodic/daily/110.clean-tmps) can be applied to additional directories by copying the line

  daily_clean_tmps_dirs="/tmp"
from /etc/defaults/periodic.conf to /etc/periodic.conf — create the latter if it doesn't exist, making sure it's only writable by root — and adding additional space-separated directory paths after /tmp (for a path containing a space or any other character that may be special to the shell, create a symlink to it with a clean path and add the symlink's path).


As an aside, perhaps a bit counter to this, after quite a bit of searching, I have not found a way to tell macOS to NOT delete the /tmp folder on reboot.

I have no real problem with the 7 day life span of files there, but since I actually do put quite a bit of "temporary context" into /tmp, it's a bit annoying to have it wiped out on restart.

Now, yes, of course, I can simply create a new folder, create my own 7 day sweeper and be done with it.

The simple nut is that I've been using /tmp for 30 years (like vi, every unix machine has a /tmp), and it's a bit hardwired into my muscle memory. And since the machine is supposed to do my bidding, not the other way around, it would be nice to be able to configure it to not do this.

But, hardly a crisis, I'm coping.


You do realize this is exactly what /tmp/ is expected to do on all *nix based machines, including Macs, right? Why not create a new path, and use that?


Now I’m questioning my knowledge. Have you found ways to configure other unix machines so they don’t wipe /tmp on boot?


For Linux - I think this will do: keep /tmp off tmpfs, don't mention it in the configs of tmpfiles.d

I might be missing something but these are the key suspects (I generally prefer this to be wiped, using tmpfs)

Not sure about anything else *nix


I setup Screenshot app to save directly to the Google Drive folder, so it's always available to me from any device. Used Dropbox up until last month before getting rid of the horrendous native client.

My downloads folder is effectively categorized as

AW - artwork, could be pics, videos that I create or download, further into monthly phone backup, jellyfin etc

SW - software, contains anything I've downloaded, specific folders for each caterory like 3D printing, setup files, repo code zips/model weights etc

PDFs - as the name implies PDFs only, mostly arxiv papers grouped by month-year folders & backed off monthly to phone & NAS

-----

Has worked like a charm for me for a while & very easy to take backups of my machine since everything essential is present within the Download sub-folders


Well, I change laptops every ~four years at work, and the problem goes away by itself


Sloppy file organization indicates sloppy thoughts.

It's not hard to stay organized. Downloads and desktop folders should be for temporary storage, and never so long that you have to scroll to see what's in them. That's what subdirectories are for.


So, you're saying I should create subdirectories under Downloads and Desktop and put files there? Got it. :)


The key is to keep whatever you put there organized and clean.


it's just a bucket for semi temporary things so I don't have to spend time thinking about where to file something when I download it. I have immediate access and can take action on it. Sometimes that means I file it where it should go. other times I just need it for a short time. About once a month I go through and file things I want to keep and trash the rest.


Off-topic but there's an obnoxious resource wasting screen "saver" that triggers after some time of inactivity in this website. I took a break and came back a few minutes later to blaring fan noise and drained battery from my laptop.


Doing CMD+Shift+5 on macOS shows the full clip menu, and in the Options section of the bar you can select it to always store the cutouts to clipboard instead of a file, or always open them to Preview; even send them to another location.


If you are looking to automate some of your chores on your Mac, Hazel is good solution for a small price. Not related but am a happy customer.

https://www.noodlesoft.com


Same, I use Hazel to periodically move files from Desktop > Downloads > Review

Gives me sort of a drip feed of items to either delete or move to a proper folder. I also place the 'Review' folder in the Dock, so it is usually empty, but every now and then a file pops up in the preview, so I can move it somewhere.


Is /tmp usually wiped on a reboot? On my slackware box the /tmp directory wasn't auto-clearing so I had to setup a cron job to wipe them every week.


My "Old" folder is 3 months old. In a few more months, I'll rename Old to Older and shove everything in "Old".


If your Mac has multiple users, putting your downloads and screenshots in /tmp might make them visible to anyone else logged in to the machine.


MacOS has a $tmpdir env var that you could use instead, it's mapped per-user.

I think /tmp/ is auto-mapped to /private/tmp though, which is also user-specific.


Ah I didn't know that; not a frequent Mac user.

Edit: after a bit of web searching, I'm not finding any suggestion that /private is somehow mapped per-user. Is this actually true?


/private and /private/tmp are shared between all users (including non-login users). $TMPDIR is safer for sensitive files, but it lacks the macOS sandboxing protection on ~/Downloads.


The article mentions /tmp is symlinked to /private/tmp


All fun and games until your system reboots in the middle of a temporary project


The tmp folder trick I knew, but the screenshot to clipboard is new!




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