Mac Crash Reports: Can You Delete DiagnosticReports?
Low riskGeneral macOSUpdated
- Location
~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports
- Risk level
- Low riskRebuilt automatically by macOS or the app that made it. Freshist selects these for you — you still see every item before anything moves.
- Selected by default
- Yes
- What Freshist does
- Moves the selected items to the Trash, so you can undo. Nothing is deleted outright.
- In the app
- Clean → Crash Reports — “Old crash and diagnostic reports. Safe to delete.”
From Freshist's own cleaning rules — the same catalog the app uses.
What lives in DiagnosticReports
When an app you're running crashes, freezes, or misbehaves badly enough for macOS to notice, the system writes a report describing what happened: the process, the thread that failed, a backtrace, loaded libraries and the macOS version. Reports from apps running under your account go to ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports. Reports from system components go to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports instead.
Apple's Console guide groups them by type, and you can tell them apart by file extension:
| Type | Extension | Written when |
|---|---|---|
| Crash reports | .ips (older macOS: .crash) | An app or process quits unexpectedly |
| Spin and hang reports | .spin, .hang | An app stops responding (the spinning cursor) |
| Diagnostic reports | .diag, .dpsub | macOS records resource use or response-time problems |
You may also find a Retired subfolder, where macOS moves older reports. Each report is small, usually a few kilobytes to a few hundred, so this folder is about tidiness and privacy more than disk space.
Why it piles up
Reports accumulate for as long as something keeps failing, and a single misbehaving background process can produce a new report every few minutes. Beta software, apps with broken updates, and helpers left behind by uninstalled apps are the usual sources. Reports also contain file paths, app names and sometimes window titles, which is a reason some people prefer not to keep years of them.
What happens if you delete them
Nothing on your Mac uses these files after they're written. Deleting them:
- Frees a little space.
- Removes the history you'd use to troubleshoot a recurring problem, or to attach to a bug report.
- Doesn't change the Analytics & Improvements sharing setting.
- Doesn't remove reports already submitted to Apple or a developer.
If an app is crashing now, read or save its latest report before you clear the folder. A developer will almost always ask for it.
Look at them first (read-only)
ls -lt ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports | head -20 # newest reports first
du -sh ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports
ls ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports | sed 's/-[0-9].*//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
The last command counts reports per app name, which quickly shows a process that crashes repeatedly.
You can also open Console (in Applications → Utilities), select Crash Reports, Spin Reports or Diagnostic Reports in the sidebar, and read each one. Administrators see both user and system reports there.
Clear them with Console or Finder
In Console, select a report and choose File → Move to Trash. That works one report at a time and is the Apple-documented route.
For a bulk cleanup, in Finder choose Go → Go to Folder…, enter ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports, select the reports you no longer need, and move them to the Trash. Leave the DiagnosticReports folder itself in place. The system-level folder in /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports needs an administrator password; it isn't covered by this page.
When to keep them
Keep recent reports while you're chasing a crash, when a support ticket with a developer or Apple is open, or when you've just installed something that might be unstable. Otherwise, older reports have no ongoing use. Related folders: Logs for app log files, and Saved Application State for the window state apps restore after a crash.
Sources
Frequently asked questions
Does deleting crash reports stop apps from crashing?
No. Reports only describe what happened. Deleting them changes nothing about the app; it just removes the record.
Are crash reports sent to Apple automatically?
Only if you allowed it. System Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements controls whether diagnostics are shared with Apple and with app developers. Deleting local reports doesn't affect that setting.
Why do I see the same app crash over and over?
Each crash writes a new report, so a repeatedly crashing helper or background agent can create hundreds. That's a sign to update or remove the app, not just to clear the folder.