~/Library/Logs on Mac: Is It Safe to Delete Logs?
Low riskGeneral macOSUpdated
- Location
~/Library/Logs
- 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 → Logs — “Diagnostic log files. Safe to delete.”
From Freshist's own cleaning rules — the same catalog the app uses.
What lives in ~/Library/Logs
This is the per-user folder where apps put plain log files: text records of what they did, which errors they hit and when. Apple's Console app shows these files under Log Reports, which it describes as reports "with information about events that occur when the system or specific apps are processing", usually ending in .log.
Typical contents on a Mac used for development:
- Folders named after apps or their bundle IDs, such as
JetBrainsorcom.apple.AMPLibraryAgent. - Simulator logs under
CoreSimulator. - Logs from helper tools, updaters and sync clients.
- The
DiagnosticReportssubfolder, which holds crash and hang reports rather than running logs.
Why it grows
Most apps rotate their logs and cap their size, but not all do. An app caught in an error loop can write gigabytes, and logs from apps you deleted long ago stay here, because dragging an app to the Trash never removes its log folder. On a healthy Mac the folder is often just a few megabytes; on the Mac used to write this page it was 8.2 MB.
What you lose by deleting logs
| Gone after deletion | Not affected |
|---|---|
| Past entries you might need for troubleshooting | The apps themselves and their settings |
| Logs a support team asked you to send | Unified system logs (Console, log show) |
| History of when an error first appeared | New logging, which starts immediately |
Nothing in this folder is needed for an app to start or work.
Look before you delete (read-only)
du -sh ~/Library/Logs
du -sh ~/Library/Logs/* | sort -h | tail -15 # biggest folders
ls -lt ~/Library/Logs | head # most recently written
You can also open Console (in Applications → Utilities), choose Log Reports in the sidebar, and read a file before you remove it. Console's File → Reveal in Finder jumps to the file's folder.
Clearing logs by hand
- Quit the app whose logs you want to remove, so it isn't writing to the file at that moment.
- In Finder, choose Go → Go to Folder… and enter
~/Library/Logs. - Move the folders or files you don't need to the Trash. Console also offers File → Move to Trash for a selected report.
If one app's folder keeps refilling, check its settings for a debug or verbose logging switch before clearing it again.
When to keep them
Keep recent logs while you're chasing a bug, waiting on a support ticket, or trying to work out when a problem started. Once the issue is solved, old logs are just disk space. The system-wide counterpart under /Library/Logs is covered in the system caches guide, crash reports in the crash reports guide, and the folder itself in the ~/Library/Logs reference.
Sources
Frequently asked questions
Does clearing ~/Library/Logs remove the macOS system log?
No. Modern macOS keeps its main log in the unified logging system, which you read with Console or the log command. That data isn't stored in ~/Library/Logs, and macOS manages its size on its own.
Is DiagnosticReports inside Logs the same thing?
It's a subfolder of crash, hang and spin reports rather than running logs. It's covered on its own in the crash reports guide, because those reports are what you send to a developer after a crash.
Why is one app's log folder huge?
Usually because the app is stuck logging the same error over and over, or debug logging was left on. Clearing the folder frees the space, but it will refill unless you fix the cause or turn the logging down.