Smart Care

Smart Care is the one-tap tidy-up on the Home screen. You start it with the big Run Tuhi - Your AI Assistant button. It clears caches, tidies large folders onto your external drive, and, when there's something to do, reclaims old local backups and keeps cloud files online-only. It looks at your Mac first and only runs the steps that will actually free space.

What happens when you tap it

The run starts straight away, right there on the Home screen: the button's animation and the status line underneath show how it's going. To see the details, tap the button again while it runs (it reads Working… tap to view). That opens the progress window; it never starts a second run.

1. Planning. For a few seconds the window says Reviewing and optimising the plan — nothing changed yet. Storage Studio measures what each step could free. Nothing on your disk changes during this part.
2. The steps run one after another. A progress bar shows Step x of N, and each step gets a tick when it finishes.
3. The summary. When it's done, the window shows Done with a short, plain-English summary of what was moved and what was freed. The same summary appears on the Home screen.

You can close the progress window at any time: you can close this — it keeps working.

%% caption: How a Smart Care run decides which steps to include
flowchart TD
  A[You tap Run Tuhi] --> B[Planning: measure what each step could free]
  B --> C{Would the step free at least 50 MB, or is it always needed?}
  C -->|Yes| D[Step joins the run]
  C -->|No| E[Shown as Not needed]
  D --> F[Steps run one at a time]
  F --> G[Free space measured again]
  G --> H[Summary of what was moved and freed]

The steps

The checklist always shows every step, so you can see what was skipped. Steps that weren't worth doing this time are greyed out and marked Not needed.

The first step is Free Up Space. A clearing step is only added when it would free at least 50 MB. The developer and log steps skip anything an app has open. Moving files needs your external drive to be connected; without it, Smart Care can still clear caches.

What Smart Care leaves alone

• Your Trash. The Empty old Trash items step is never added to a run, because emptying the Trash can't be undone. One thing to know: the first step runs your Free Up Space rules, and the default rules include one that clears items that have been in the Trash for more than 30 days. If you'd rather that never happens, turn on Never delete personal files — only move them in Settings → Rules. See The Trash and the space it holds.
• Your personal files are never deleted. Downloads, Desktop and Documents are only ever moved (with a shortcut left behind), never cleared.
• Settings, sign-ins and history. Only the parts of an app's data that rebuild by themselves are cleared. See Clearing app caches safely.

Every move a run makes is recorded together as one restore point, so you can put the whole run back in one go.

Duplicate files after a run

If a background duplicate scan has found exact copies, Smart Care can offer to clean them up at the end of a run. It never does this on its own: you see Duplicate files found, with how much it would free and which copy it keeps, and you choose Move extras to Trash, Review first… or Skip. This offer is controlled by Let Smart Care clean duplicate files in Settings → Rules, which is on by default. See Finding and removing duplicates.

Why the "freed" number can look small

The figure in the summary is the change in the same free-space number your storage chart shows, measured just before the first step and just after the last. Space reclaimed from local snapshots is reported on its own line, because macOS already counts that space as available. Right after a big move, your Mac may also hold on to the freed space for a while in its automatic backups; the summary says so when that's happening. See Why deleting files doesn't always give the space back.

See also: Freeing up space: the options · Meet Tuhi · Local snapshots · Optimise Cloud Storage Locally · Reviewing, stopping and checking a clear-up