The Great Digital Declutter

Hello and welcome to another episode of App Stories. I'm John Voorhees and I have Federico Vettici with me. Hey, Tici. Hello, John. Happy Monday. Happy Monday. I'm doing all right. You know, recording a full week in advance is a wild thing. I'm not used to it yet, but I kind of like it. People are getting us fresh after a weekend of relaxation.

We've only been up for a while. I mean, you've been up longer than I have, but hey, here we are ready to go. And we've got lots of interesting topics today, I think, because... I was doing something on Saturday morning that made me think that it could be something we'd talk about.

on app stories which is i was sitting at the kitchen table and i realized i happened to look to see how much space i had on my iphone because you know my iphone 17 pro max is pretty new i have the 512 gigabyte model and i thought I wonder how much I have full because I knew I was not too far off of full when I had my 16. And I looked. And I had plenty of room, but I realized I had way too many apps. So I started deleting apps, and that made me think about kind of...

organizing and maintaining and tidying up your digital life. And so I thought we would talk today about kind of like some of what our strategies are for those things and some of the apps that we use to accomplish it. Yeah, and I think we're coming at this from two very different perspectives. We are. You have always been more of a digital hoarder. than I am. You do cling on to a lot of files and a lot of more things than I do. And I think I use way more web apps.

than you. And as a consequence of that, like most of my data these days is always backed up in a cloud somewhere, which is why I am not too... precious about data loss in the sense that Well, it comes down to the service that I got to trust, right? Whether it's iCloud Photos or Google Drive or Notion for that matter. Like I don't necessarily think about... I do back up, especially my most important stories of the year, but...

I mean, it comes down to trusting that Notion keeps their servers going. And, you know, I have version history in Notion and all that kind of stuff. I don't deal, unlike you, I don't deal with a lot of heavy files like video, audio. That's more of your responsibility. I have those files, but I don't backup those files. I do use Google Drive. pretty extensively. I recently looked, this is part of this conversation to an extent, in that I recently looked at backup strategies.

For my two Macs, I still have a Mac Studio on loan from Apple, and I have my own personal MacBook Pro with the M4 Pro. and i was so fed up with backblaze oh tell me about it i'm interested that you said that because i was going to say that exact thing Yeah, I just couldn't stand the constant... I do find the whole process of issuing a license for Backblaze on multiple computers very confusing.

I wish there were just a way for me to say, I'm going to give you $200 a year and I'm just going to back up all of my machines. That doesn't exist. And so every once in a while, like especially after I set up a Mac. the M5 for review purposes and I used Migration Assistant. My Backblaze license was automatically migrated to that MacBook Pro and I didn't want it. And so...

I started getting alerts on both my personal MacBook Pro and the Mac Studio for some reason, which I didn't use for the migration. And so those alerts wouldn't go away. And I tried to fix it. It's confusing. I tried to fix it. I couldn't fix it. So I thought, you know what? I'm just going to get rid of it because I'm tired of having to micromanage this thing. And so I looked at other options. I tried ARC with a Q, ARC backup. I also found it confusing.

I just wanted to have something that would back up some folders for me on Google Drive. Because I have like five terabytes of storage on Google Drive. And I just want to be able to back up some folders from my Mac where... It's the only place where I keep some local stuff like scripts, backups, local backups. And I realized yesterday that I could just use the Google Drive app on the Mac.

to sync some folders to google drive true and and i'm and i've just been using that okay i was gonna i have a suggestion for you okay That will be, I think you'll like for a couple of reasons. I would suggest the app Carbon Copy Cloner, which is, I find, very easy to use. But that requires an external drive. It does, but what you do is instead of getting a big, heavy, loud, noisy external drive, you get an SSD. You get one of the Samsung T9s. It's little. You can tuck it away somewhere.

And it's very, very fast, so you never notice it. doing the backup i literally have a four terabyte one of those that's connected to my um my mac studio and it does hourly backups because it's so fast i don't even notice it doing anything it just sits in a little tray under the edge of my desk doing its thing over and over and over again 24 hours a day and yeah it'll run out it'll wear out eventually but i'll get a new one then uh that's that's that's my main backup i i find

that ssds i mean the thing about a four terabyte ssd is it's not a cheap ssd that's going to run you at least 250 probably unless you get a good a good deal from max story's deals i was about to say i know i know these accounts called Max Stories Deals that every once in a while posts a good deal for an SSD. And when I see a good T9 deal, I drop it right in there because those are my favorite drives for this kind of thing. They're USB 3.2.

Gen 2. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so backups have been on my mind because we wanted to do this topic about digital cleanup and dig... decluttering your devices. And so I realized, well, I maybe got to reconsider my backup strategy on the Mac. And so I am syncing some stuff to Google Drive now.

And it's basically like Dropbox. You just select a folder and it creates a two-way sync between that folder and Google Drive. But I think I'm going to wait for Black Friday, get a good deal on SSD, plug it into the back of my Mac Studio. while I still have it and use it as a destination for a carbon copy corner. And I've been thinking about like, what's going to happen when the Mac Studio loan is up? Yeah. Because I got...

I got spoiled, right, by this M3 Ultra Mac Studio with half a terabyte of RAM. Now, obviously, I'm not going to spend the money to buy one of those myself. I have gotten used to having a Mac desktop.

i think i am gonna get a mac mini yeah i would get i would get a like a high-end mini you know like with all really spec'd up i would get that t9 backup drive and when you're ready to switch and send your mac studio back to back to apple instead of doing you know time machine backups or carbon copy cloner backups on it i would just do an of that drive.

on the Mac Studio onto the SSD because then your migration will be really quick to the new computer. That's kind of how I would do it. That's been my strategy when I have loaners from Apple is to keep an SSD around so that I can do them. Or you can just... You can buy the new computer before you send back the other old one and just do a regular migration. That's probably the easier thing anyway. Do we know if Apple is doing an M5 Mac Mini?

Probably next year. Yeah, I wouldn't expect we see that until summer or fall next year. Yeah, because they probably want to do the M5 Pro on it as well. I think so. I think so. So, yeah, I think that we're going to see kind of a rash of computers over the summer and early fall next year with the M5. You know, I think we'll get the Mac Studio. I think we'll get the MacBook Pro. And I think we'll get the Mini, too, probably all three.

of those and they'll probably space them out some of the pro models probably come out near wwdc whereas the the mini probably will be more like a back to school type of thing you know like in august or september interesting that you mentioned google drive because i've been you know we I moved to Google Drive primarily because the complete package of Google Drive Plus

Google Gemini was a better deal just price-wise than maintaining Dropbox. And there's certain things about Google Drive the way it works, which are a little different than Dropbox, that have still been kind of bothering me, a little bit of friction points. I have moved to an alternative to the Finder that I've been using for the last few weeks called Bloom which is really really a Bloom it's a really great app it's Bloom I think the website is Bloom App.club, I want to say. Odd URL, but...

In any event, it works better with Google Drive than other apps that I've used before. Finder sometimes is a little wonky with Google Drive, and so is Forklift, which is another alternative to the Finder that I've used from time to time. There's a lot of other reasons.

i like bloom too i'll probably write about it at some point but i feel like with finder replacements that the kind of things you have to live with for quite a while before you're really sure that it's like worth doing because the finder is so deeply integrated in the system it's not

the kind of app that's easily replaceable on a mac yeah bloom finder but refined okay yeah interesting so anyway backups are part of decluttering because obviously that The stuff that you have is also the stuff that's going to be backed up. I wanted to start very simple about this idea of how do we keep our computers organized and our devices organized with not too much junk on it.

A very simple thing for me is to, on the iPhone and iPad, to use the app library a lot. I am not a heavy user of the app library as an app launcher. I am a heavy user of the app library as a way to clean up after myself. I agree. I go into the app library because it's a very neat way to see all of your apps by category.

And it's especially handy for deleting a whole bunch of those test flights that I inevitably accumulate over time. They get a special test flight folder in the app library. And it's a very handy way, first of all, to see, okay, which... Which apps do I still have on TestFlight? Am I still using it? Should I get the App Store version now?

if it's launched. So it's a good way to see the apps and migrate the App Store version, but also to just delete some of those betas that I don't need anymore. And it's also a nice way to browse by category and see like, oh, what's in my productivity folder? I probably don't need it. to have five different email clients now that I've made a decision. Same for task managers. You can also do this in settings, but in settings, you get just an alphabetical list of apps, right?

I got some notification on Saturday from Spark, and that's what caused me to go through and clean them. I'm like, what am I doing with Spark on my phone? I haven't used it in probably a year and a half. Yeah. Have you ever offloaded apps? I have never done it. No, no. I feel like if I've got the space.

I don't know why I would do that. I don't really feel like I have a reason to do that. I go about it a little differently. I don't go through the folders so much. I went through the list. I tapped the search field and just went through the list alphabetically and just... scan through and you know good rule of thumb if you look at an icon and the name of an app and you have no idea what it does yeah you should probably delete it yeah yes that's what i did yes i

I also wanted to mention that I do a version of this with shortcuts because that's another area of the operating system that I tend to overgrow. over time and every once in a while it needs a little trimming so I have set up this is new I have set up on macOS Tahoe an automation I made years ago a shortcut called shortcut exporter And that creates a copy of every single shortcut in my library as .shortcut files in files or finder. And I set it up as an automation on my Mac.

So that every day it creates a copy of that backup in a folder on my Mac. That folder I set up as a synced directory in Google Drive. So I have sort of an off-site backup. of my shortcuts in case I accidentally delete one of them because I do go in there and every once in a while I create a lot of test shortcuts that tend to end up at the top level.

of the shortcuts app and then every once in a while i go in there i'm like okay what was this i don't need anymore i'm just gonna delete it i have so many they're just called new shortcut because you know i mean it's gotten better at managing those like if there's literally no action in a shortcut

it goes away now which is i really appreciate because before that i used to have tons of new shortcut one new shortcut two new shortcut three all those things yeah yeah and so that's that's what i do and on the mac uh there's Is there an app library on the Mac? I don't think there is. No, there isn't. There is the new overlay in Tahoe for your apps. But I just do it the old-fashioned way. I go into the Applications folder.

in Finder because I'm not fancy like you. I don't use a Finder replacement. And I select all the apps that I don't need anymore. And I just hit delete. And my tip is that I use Hazel. I used Hazel on the Mac and I enabled this option called AppSweep. Yeah, that's a good option.

It's a good option that when it detects that you're deleting an app on macOS, it also offers to delete the cache files, the data files in application support. Yeah, there's sometimes logs and other things that are scattered around your system.

yeah yeah and so whenever i delete an app it also hazel kicks in and offers to delete the sort of those hidden files yeah they're they're little files usually but at the same time it's nice just to get rid of them because you never know if that might cause a conflict with something in the future

One tip I have for shortcuts is what I try to do to avoid that top-level shortcut problem is I have a folder called experiments, and I start every new shortcut in experiments, and that's the folder that grows out of control. And at some point, if I haven't revisited it and turned it into something that's useful that goes into some other dedicated folder, then I just wipe out everything in the experiments folder and start over with that. Yeah.

What else do you do on your device? What's your situation like? All right. So on the Mac, the Mac is where I do most of the... the maintenance because as you noted, I do a lot of, I deal with a lot of big files. So for instance, like for this show,

we will have two audio tracks that are pretty large, chunky WAV files. They're not like video chunky, and I have a lot of space on my Mac. I've got four terabytes, but they're probably going to be like 200 to 250 megabytes. And as I process the audio... I take the WAV file and I run it through three different apps each time copying that file. So at the end of that process, I'll have the original and I'll have six copies. And then we have video too. And so I will copy.

the video files for our video editor basically the process is Don't make any changes on the originals ever. Always duplicate at each stage of the process so that you can roll back easily if there's a mistake and you need to do it. It saves a lot of time in that sense. But that also means that at the end of the day, once this show comes out, I've got just tons of WAV files. I've got a couple of MP3s. You know, there are two versions of this show. So I actually have two Logic.

projects for the plus and the regular version of app stories i'll have transcripts for the video thumbnails for the video all kinds of of little files and so what i do is i set up a pretty careful system for tracking both the audio side and the video side of the production work And then on Tuesdays, because Tuesday after NPC is released, I don't have another podcast that's coming out until Friday. So there's like a little gap there. That's kind of nice because I don't have to.

rush to get everything cleaned up but i always i never want to get rid of files until i know something's published and there are no problems so like sometime on tuesday afternoon after npc's been out for a while and nobody said oh hey john you screwed up this thing

I will go through and I'll just delete all that stuff except for the final product. I keep the MP3s of... the podcast audio and i keep the final mp4 not uh not upscale at 1080 because i can always re-upscale it and i take those and about once a month those files get moved to an external drive that i also mirror onto a second drive. And so I've got an archive of every podcast we've ever recorded, both audio and video.

for all the shows and I keep them that way. And I also, I haven't been religious about this, but I usually keep the logic projects too, because the logic projects, it's only happened a handful of times, but once in a while. it can be handy to go back in there and those contain like the original wave files embedded in them and you can kind of go in and do a you know grab a little bit of something and

I know that you like to give me a hard time about being a digital hoarder, Federico, but it does come in handy once in a while when you will say, John, do you know, do you have this? And I'll be like, yeah, of course I have that, right? I mean, it wasn't that long ago you asked me about.

I forget what it was. It was either a video or audio from some, oh, you know what it was? It was our club town halls. You asked me if I had the original audio because we changed how we're dealing with those on Libsyn. And yeah, I had a full catalog. of all of those episodes all ready to go. MP3s all just sitting there on a drive. That is true. That is true. You do keep that stuff around and it comes in handy every once in a while. Every once in a while. Not all the time.

I don't know. I think having originals of the stuff that we do is useful. I don't do it so much with text because text is so easy to get back off of the web since we control. you know the database that mac stories lives on it's a little different when you're dealing with uploading audio and video to a third-party service which may or may not lose your data at some point so i like to have have the originals of that stuff

I also wanted to mention a couple of other features of Hazel on the Mac. I also enabled the option to automatically delete the files sitting in the trash for longer than a month. Okay. If something's been in... If I haven't emptied my trash in more than a month and something's still there, I probably don't need it. And so it just takes you...

care of its own and it keeps the trash size under one gigabyte for me. That is something that you can configure in Hazel's settings. And so that's what I do. And I also have some, you know, you can set up rules. for your downloads folder to automatically delete stuff that's been sitting in the downloads folder for like a month. I've done that in the past. I just like to review manually.

what's in my downloads and just delete that stuff myself. But you can do that automatically if you want to. And I wanted to give a quick shout out to two options on iOS that I've been using that I... that I like. There's a ton of apps for deleting photos on iOS, right? Obviously you can do most of this, you can have most of this functionality yourself. with the standard photos app.

For example, if you accumulate a lot of screenshots or a lot of screen recordings, you can just go into those sections in the Photos app and you can, you know, browse by collection, essentially going there, select all and get rid of all your screenshots. But there's a couple of options that I want to mention. One is Clean My Phone, which is by the folks at Magpaw, the makers of the popular Clean My Mac. Now, obviously, you cannot...

offer the kind of experience on iOS that CleanMyMac provides on macOS because iOS is not open like that. You cannot have that kind of utility with deep hooks into the file system on iOS and iPadOS. So instead, Clean My Phone is mostly based on the idea of scanning your photo library and giving you more filters than you have in the Photos app. And it takes a while to run. Like I, you know, I have 45,000 items in my iCloud for a library and it took like about an hour.

to run on device. But it basically breaks down into multiple categories for you, like duplicates. This is one of the nice things that CleanMyPhone can do. Large videos. So it gives you a way to see, okay. short videos, but what about the big ones? So you can go in there, you can see which video, and I have, it turns out, 60 gigabytes of large videos. And what I like is that you can choose to clean it all, or you can just review the individual items.

there and choose which ones you want to keep, which ones you don't want to keep around. The other options is called Shutter Declutter. This is a new app that came out a few months ago, I think. And it's got that sort of like intuitive UI where you can just swipe left and right and choose which photos you want to keep. There's a bunch of apps like this and it can send you daily reminders to go in there and clean up your photos. Personally,

I prefer the every once in a while nuclear approach of clean my phone. Yeah, that's what I do too. does a whole scan, and then you can decide. And you can do this twice a year, for example, and keep an eye on the size of your photo library.

I usually, I was going to say, I usually do it during the holidays, just when I'm sitting around, you know, it's a good time to do it. There's another category in clean my phone that I like, which is blurry photos, especially like it. So that one, like, I don't know, you're carrying around your phone, you have the camera app open and you just accidentally.

take a picture of the ground, that kind of thing. It'll find all those. Yeah. And the other app for macOS that I wanted to mention that I've been using for years, and it's a great way to discover... huge folders or files that you forgot about is DaisyDisk. Yeah, it's very good. This has been around for more than a decade, I think. It gives you that sort of like...

There's a name for it. I call it like a flower UI. It's not the proper name. It's got this radial thing going on. Yeah, it's like a radial. area graph or something. It gives you a visualization. A visualization with colored blocks for which parts of your file system are wasting storage. And you can hover over it, see how much storage it is.

click on it and it digs into that folder and then you can keep expanding or going back. It's a good way to discover that your Spotify cache is now 10 gigabytes or you have that huge... project that you cloned from GitHub and it's five gigabytes for no reason. You know, those kinds of things that you do with the terminal, they download some huge assets and then you forget about it and you realize, oh, why?

Am I wasting 20 gigabytes on this thing? Daisy disk is a nice way to declutter. And again, you can do it not every single week, but you can do it a few times a year and keep your storage in check like that. So, you know, when I use Daisy Disk is alongside just kind of keeping my files organized the way I explained is I keep iStatMenu in my menu bar.

with nothing except for how full my SSD is. And that way I know, you know. It's really weird with APFS. I have no idea how to explain how much space I'm actually using because there's all this kind of... I don't even know. We should get John Syracuse on the show. I don't understand it. All I know is that it fills up and not all of it is real. So what I do is if it gets to the point where I'm...

concerned that it's going to affect the performance of my Mac. Like, you know, maybe it gets over 80 or 90%. right now it's only at 67 i will go in i'll take daisy disk and i'll look for those random big files that i have that undoubtedly escaped my system of being organized that i i can delete and then i'll do clean my mac

And I'll allow it to kind of reset all those systems with APFS. And usually... what i have sitting at 67 right now because i've got a full production of app stories unwind and npc undeleted will drop back down to i don't know 50 to 55 so there's probably 10 on my drive at any one point

that can be deleted. And so that's a big change for me now that we're doing video is that I'm constantly dealing with a lot of files that I have to delete on a pretty regular basis or else my drive will fill up. Yeah, yeah. Is there anything else you want to mention for the things that you do? Yeah, I don't think so. I think that those are the big things that I do. One of the things I don't do is I don't sweat.

being hyper-organized with my files that well obviously obviously you don't well i do with the video and the audio but but like my downloads folder for instance is my junk drawer i put everything in downloads and i don't see any reason to get rid of it Every now and then I'll go through and I'll delete the DMGs and I'll delete maybe the zip files and I'll delete all kinds of big stuff in there. We used to be able to query. the contents of the downloads folder using Sky.

But since that's been acquired by OpenAI and stopped working for me. I was going to, I meant to ask you about that because I tried it again over the weekend. I was like, oh, I think this has been disconnected from any sort of backend. Yep. I sent you a couple of days ago this alternative to Sky that I saw on Reddit called Fluent. Fluent version 1.4. I mean, it looks...

Pretty similar to Sky with the tabbed UI. Yeah, Sky wasn't the only, they weren't first to that idea. I'd seen it before Sky even. Yeah, well, there are alternatives out there to Sky if you want to look for him. It's a shame. I mean, we haven't really talked about it on the show. On the one hand, it's kind of a shame that Sky, which you kind of previewed in May, will never see the latest.

day in the form that we used it for readers. On the other hand, I kind of feel like it was inevitable. And you said as much in your preview was that. This is just begging to be acquired by one of the big AI companies, and it has been. Yeah, in hindsight, I kind of wonder, and this is just my personal opinion, I... absolutely don't know any of the details because obviously all the people involved are keeping those things private because of this

I mean, it's an important deal between OpenAI and this team, just my personal speculation. I kind of wonder if maybe in hindsight, that article, I've been thinking about it, like, why? was I given this opportunity to write about it? And I wonder if maybe it was... I don't want to say that my article was a fancy pitch deck, but I'm saying that... It didn't hurt. Didn't hurt. You and David Pierce had a big profile on them, too, over at The Verge, I remember.

Yeah, yeah. So it's a shame that it'll never see the light of day. We'll see what OpenAI will do with it. But yeah, I think roughly speaking, if there's a takeaway from this episode is that from what I've seen so far, the process of cleaning up... You and I, we do it manually. There's no AI involved because we don't trust it with our files. Oh, no, I would not do that. I agree. Hazel's about as far as I would go in terms of automation. Automation, yeah.

Yeah. And even that it's, I'm like you, it's like, okay, if it's over 30 days old, I'm pretty comfortable that, that I'm not going to need it. But anything, anything that's newer than that, I'd want to delete myself manually after looking at what it is. Well, in the post-show for AppStories Plus members, we are going to talk about our latest experiments with VibeCoding. Because John and I, we have independently been using CloudCode.

For whatever John has been up to. I have continued my experiments with Type in Mind, which I mentioned last week. And I am so far up to 12 million tokens used on Grok. 12 million. So for a grand total of $9, John. I was going to say, does that cost a lot of money? Obviously not. $9. So we're going to be talking about what we've been up to on that front.

All right. Sounds good, Federico. Thanks for everybody for joining us today. We will be back in another week. In the meantime, you can find us on maxstories.net. And on social media where Federico is at Faticci. That's V-I-T-I-C-C-I. And I'm at John Voorhees. J-O-H-N-V-O-O-R-H-O-E-S. Talk to you next week, Federico. Ciao, John.