Weekly cleaning, alerts and starting at login

Crumb can look after your Mac without you opening it. Three things make that work: the weekly clean, the alerts, and Crumb staying open in your menu bar.

Clean every week on its own

1. Open Crumb and go to Overview.
2. Scroll down to Recent cleanups.
3. Turn on Clean every week on its own.

Within about half an hour, and then once a week, Crumb scans and clears what would start ticked in Free Space and rebuilds itself: caches, logs, build data and the like. Apps that are open are left alone.

The weekly clean never empties the Trash, and never touches anything in the Your call section or anything protected. Each run shows up in Recent cleanups marked Automatic, and you get a notification saying how much it freed.

The weekly clean is part of Crumb Pro. Turn the switch off at any time to stop it.

Keep Crumb running

The weekly clean and the alerts only happen while Crumb is running. Closing the window is fine: Crumb keeps running in the menu bar. If you choose Quit Crumb, or restart your Mac, they wait until Crumb is open again.

The easy way to be sure is to have Crumb open every time your Mac starts.

Open Crumb at login

Crumb doesn't add itself to your login items, so you choose whether it starts with your Mac. To add it:

1. Open System Settings and go to General → Login Items. On macOS 15 and later it's called Login Items & Extensions.
2. Under Open at Login, click the + button.
3. Choose Crumb in your Applications folder, then click Open.

On macOS 12 Monterey, it's System Preferences → Users & Groups. Select your account, open the Login Items tab and click +.

When Crumb starts at login, its window opens. Close it and Crumb carries on in the menu bar. To stop it starting at login, select Crumb in the same list and click −.

Alerts

• Disk almost full. When more than 90% of your disk is in use, Crumb sends a notification, and reminds you while it stays that full, so you can clean up before you run out.
• Weekly tidy. Once a week, if Crumb freed any space that week, a notification says how much.
• Auto-tidy. After each weekly clean, a notification says how much it freed.

Crumb asks to send notifications the first time it finishes a scan. To change your answer later, open System Settings → Notifications and choose Crumb.

The menu bar

The Crumb icon in your menu bar shows how much space is free. Click it to open the window. Right-click it, or Control-click, for the menu:

The top of the menu also shows how much of your disk is used, and what your last scan found.