History: undo any cleanup, and see what stayed free

Undo in Finder first

macOS has its own undo for the Trash. Right after moving something, Edit → Undo in Finder (⌘Z) puts it back. Later, open the Trash, right-click the item and choose Put Back. Both only work while the item is still in the Trash: emptying the Trash, or using Finder's Delete Immediately, removes it for good.

That's the whole reason MacClearings moves things to the Trash and keeps a record of each move. History is that record.

What History keeps

Every cleanup is saved on your Mac with its date, which view it came from (Suggestions, the Map, Find, Duplicates, Applications or Compress), and for each item its original path, where it landed in the Trash and its size. Items that were skipped are kept too, with the reason: it changed since it was measured, it was open in an app, or it's now protected. The screenshot shows History before the first cleanup: "When you clean up, every item is listed here with an Undo button."

The steps from a suggestion to the Trash are the same for every view, and the Help sheet lays them out:

Undo and Put Back

Undo restores every item from a cleanup that's still in the Trash, each to the folder it came from. Put Back does the same for one item. Right-click an item to show it in the Trash, or, once it's back, to reveal it in Finder.

Restores never overwrite. If something new now sits at the original path, the item comes back beside it as “name (restored)”, then “(restored 2)” and so on. The confirmation after a cleanup has an Undo button too, for when you change your mind straight away.

Undo and Put Back stop working for an item once it leaves the Trash. History shows such items as no longer in the Trash, and keeps the record. MacClearings never empties the Trash itself, so nothing leaves it unless you empty it. That's also when the space comes back. If the space doesn't seem to return, the guide to Mac storage not adding up lists the usual reasons.

Space that lasts

Moving a cache to the Trash frees space for a while. Apps then rebuild it. To show the difference, MacClearings looks at each place you cleaned up again after a day, a week and a month, and History adds it up: how much you freed, how much came back and how much stayed free, for each rule.

Space that lasts

Example numbers

Moved to the Trash

14.5 GB

Came back in a month

1.7 GB

Stayed free

12.8 GB

1 day+800 MB

1 week+1.5 GB

1 month+1.7 GB

Stayed freeCame back

Space that lasts by rule, after a month

Rule	Freed	Came back	Stayed free
Xcode DerivedData	7.4 GB	1.2 GB	6.2 GB
Package manager caches	6.3 GB	300 MB	6.0 GB
Editor caches	600 MB	200 MB	400 MB
App logs	200 MB	0 GB	200 MB

A few details keep the numbers honest:

• Checks run while MacClearings is open. If it's closed when one falls due, it runs the next time you open it.
• If a place can't be read, often for lack of Full Disk Access, nothing is recorded. It's never counted as staying free.
• Undo and Put Back take items out of the totals, because space you put back wasn't freed.

The same numbers feed the Stayed free card on the Overview and the order of groups in Suggestions, so rules whose space comes back sink and rules whose space holds rise. The guide to clearing cache on a Mac explains why caches behave this way.

Snapshots

The Snapshots tab saves the folder sizes of your current scan, only sizes, never file contents, on your Mac. Save one now and another in a week, then pick two and choose Compare to see which folders grew and which shrank, and by how much. With two or more snapshots of the same folder, a chart shows how it has grown over time. Forgetting a snapshot removes only MacClearings' own record, not your files.

Where the record lives

History, the space-that-lasts measurements and snapshots are stored in ~/Library/Application Support/MacClearings, compressed, on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded. The safety page covers the rest of the safety model, including the checks each item passes right before it moves.