Disc utilities

[dogdr]

In the past I used a disc cleaning utility and it completely messed up the my hand database. Support said this was not unusual and had a long list of ways to get it back but it was a relatively new database and I just started over. My mac is slowing down a lot (old MacBook air with a M1 chip) and I would like to use a disc cleaning program again but I don't remember which one I used last time that destroyed my database. Does anybody have any experience using one and which one did you use that didn't destroy the hand history and database?

Thanks

[Flag_Hippo]

If you are going to be using a tool like that then there is the potential for it to corrupt your PostgreSQL data. As a precaution you can backup your database before using any disk cleaning tool:

Guide: Backup & Restore

Also you should be able to configure the cleanup tool to exclude PostgreSQL so it should not touch database files:

/Library/PostgreSQL/[version]/data

For general Mac performance, macOS is usually quite good at managing its own storage, and third-party cleaners often cause more problems than they solve. You may get better results simply by manually freeing up disk space.