Preferences
The Preferences window opens with a permanent left sidebar listing six sections — Services, Quiet Hours, Rules, Notifications, License, Advanced. Every section is one click away in plain sight; there are no overflow menus or hidden tabs.
Services
The first section in the sidebar, on purpose — this is where to look when something in Storage Studio feels off. The page lists every background component as a row with a traffic-light dot:
- 🟢 Green — Running normally. Either actively working or idle and
ready. No action needed.
- 🟡 Yellow — Sleeping or waiting. Paused, awaiting a connection,
or temporarily unable to act but expected to recover automatically (e.g. external drive disconnected; transfers queued behind a missing drive; license check-in awaiting next cadence).
- 🔴 Red — Stopped or needs attention. The detail line explains
what to do.
Rows are grouped into three sections so the page scans coherently:
Storage engines — Background service · External drive · Free Up Space engine · Data Transfers · Data Parking.
Licensing + connections — Your plan · License check-in · Software updates · Cloud accounts.
System health — App permissions · Daily storage snapshots · Anonymous activity reporting · Self-healing monitor.
The page refreshes continuously while it's open.
Quiet Hours
Three modes — Scheduled, Smart (recommended), Always-on — controlling when Storage Studio is allowed to run heavy operations like cache cleanup and scheduled relocations. The Smart mode pauses automatically when you're active on your Mac, on low battery, or in a meeting (detected via camera/mic-in-use flag — your A/V is never recorded).
Rules
Edit your active rules and global overrides (e.g. "Never delete personal files — only move them", age floors). Changes apply automatically; the background service picks them up within 30 seconds.
Notifications
A single toggle for Notify after every successful auto-action run. Off by default.
License
Your plan, subscription, and activation. See Activate your license and License management for the full walkthrough.
Advanced
- Reveal config file in Finder / Open in default editor for
hand-edits to your settings file.
- Startup — Launch Storage Studio at login toggle (uses the
same macOS service-management entry as System Settings → General → Login Items).
- Permissions — Full Disk Access detection with a 4-step
walkthrough when not granted.
- Self-backup — Snapshot your settings and recent pairings to the
external fast drive so a Mac reinstall doesn't lose them.
- About — version and app details, all selectable for copy-paste
into bug reports.
Self-healing (built in)
Storage Studio audits its own background components at every launch and continuously while the app is running — often while you're actively using it, less often when it's hidden, suspended entirely during sleep, with an immediate re-check on wake. It silently repairs anything that's gone wrong in the background, restarts a background component if it has stopped, restores missing settings, and gets a stuck job moving again.
By design, successful repairs are not surfaced in the popover — there's nothing for you to do, and "we fixed N things at launch" would contradict the All systems normal header above it. If you want detail, Preferences → Services → Self-healing monitor shows the latest audit time and outcome. The audit runs entirely on your Mac — nothing about its operation is sent anywhere.