Simplifying my Mac

[Maxwideman]

A short while back I bought a MacPro (desktop) 2010-2012 to replace by old MacPro early 2008 to enable installing a later version of the Mac OS X. I did all the right things in migrating all my data, except that in installing a later version of OS X (10-12-6) I created a user account. I am the only user of this machine in a private suite, so having multiple users is unnecessary. Since I always log on as the Administrator, I find it very irritating having to dig down for some of my files such as some applications; various app support files, some documents and deleted users (6 GB) in all over 50 GB.

Is there any way I can clean up the mess by raising the important stuff to the top level?

Thank you.

 

[honestone]

Here are some suggestions (and I use them):

1. For applications, you can have an icon of each one in your Dock. For example, I have ones for VLC, Transmission, Onyx, Quicken 2017, EasyFind, SuperDuper!, Disk Utility, Microsoft Word 2016, Microsoft Excel 2016, and Tech Tool Pro. (The installation of the Mac OS also puts some there for you that are Apple-specific: iTunes, Calendar, etc.).

2. For a number of applications, under the File Menu, there is an "Open Recent" option. If you select that, you'll see files/documents that were recently used with the application.

Of course, the one I always recommend is to perform disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs, from a software perspective, on a frequent basis. One can actually do a lot of disk cleanup on their own, and there are some excellent products available (both free and commercial) that can help with such tasks.

One thing that can eat disk space is deleted EMails. When one deletes an EMail, it actually is not permanently removed. It actually still resides on the EMail program's data base. If you actually want such an EMail permanently removed, it can be done, but the procedure to do it varies from one EMail program to another. I use Outlook 2016 as my EMail client, and that task of permanently removing a deleted EMail is quite easy. However, the (simple) 2 step process is unique to Outlook 2016.