Should I do any regular maintenance?

The short answer is: No.

macOS is designed not to need any form of regular —i.e. scheduled— maintenance. All housekeeping jobs are already performed automatically by the operating system. Under normal circumstances, you won’t have to care about technical details, which follows the usual philosophy of Apple products. Recurring tasks, like monitoring printers, or removing expired crash logs, are automatically handled by service programs running in the background. Other tasks, like defragmenting hard drives, are carried out as a side effect of normal operations, or are avoided altogether by using up-to-date technology.

For this reason, you won’t need to use any of the features of TinkerTool System on a regular basis. By intention, the tool does not contain any scheduler, “autopilot,” or similar functions.

In some cases, scheduled maintenance could even be harmful to your computer. In particular, this is true for most cache-cleaning features. Cleaning caches can be an important troubleshooting procedure in case your computer is indeed suffering from a software problem, but it always has bad side effects, because the system and applications have to rebuild their caches, which can take days, depending on case. During this period, the system will run slower than usual, because cache information has to be refetched or recomputed. In summary, cleaning caches without a specific technical reason does not make any sense. It will cause the computer to run worse. For this reason, TinkerTool System introduced new features which can troubleshoot caches, but avoids cache-cleaning unless it is absolutely necessary.

This does not mean that macOS would not need any maintenance at all. But you won’t need to do it on a regular basis. Maintenance should only be done when there is actually something to repair.

There can be several causes for technical problems with a computer running macOS, which make maintenance necessary:

• Early versions of the operating system may contain defects (“bugs”) which have not been fixed yet.
• The operating system can contain general design flaws which are not planned to be fixed, but are causing problems nevertheless.
• Badly written installation software of third-party vendors has damaged parts of the system.
• While working with administrative permissions, you have made a mistake in operating the machine.
• You like to use advanced features of the system, but don’t have the necessary skills to activate them on the UNIX command-line.

In all these cases, TinkerTool System can assist you.

If you are unsure when to use a specific maintenance feature of TinkerTool System, click the help button at the upper right of each control pane.