A tangled line-drawn jungle of leaves, ferns and vines

apple silicon · open source · mit

Your Mac's disk,
explained. Then trimmed.

Broza maps every APFS volume, says in plain English what each one is for, and frees space with a dry run first and a 30-day undo.

Get started View on GitHub

$ brew install borlafu/broza/broza

The tangle is cut and becomes an evenly spaced row of leaves

No network, no telemetry
System volumes untouchable
Cloud files never deleted

quick start

Free up disk space on your Mac in three commands

Install it, look at what is there, then trim. The trim step is a dry run until you add --apply.

1 · install

Pick your installer

$ brew install borlafu/broza/broza

The tap is borlafu/homebrew-broza; brew upgrade keeps it current.

$ curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/borlafu/broza/releases/latest/download/broza-cli-installer.sh | sh

Installs the signed binary from the latest release.

$ cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/borlafu/broza broza-cli

Builds from source against the committed Cargo.lock.

2 · look

See where the space went

$ broza scan

$ broza suggest

scan maps disks, containers and volumes. suggest groups what can go by risk level.

3 · trim

Dry run, then apply

$ broza clean --risk green

$ broza clean --risk green --apply

The first command changes nothing. The second asks you to confirm, then moves items to quarantine.

Requires macOS 26 or 27 on Apple Silicon. Full Disk Access is optional: without it Broza scans what it can and tells you what it skipped.

Live session

What a full pass actually looks like

Scan, suggest, dry run, apply — real output from the CLI, replayed at the speed it runs.

broza — a clean-up pass

$ broza scan
Physical disk  disk0  —  APPLE SSD AP1024Z  (1.00 TB)
└─ APFS container  disk3  (994.7 GB)
   ├─ Used        812.4 GB  ████████████████░░░░  81.7%
   ├─ Free         98.1 GB
   └─ Purgeable    84.1 GB  ← estimate; macOS shows this as "available"

   Volumes in this container:
   ┌ Macintosh HD         System     11.3 GB   read-only, sealed
   ├ Macintosh HD - Data  Data      798.2 GB   ← your data
   ├ Preboot              Preboot     6.5 GB
   ├ Recovery             Recovery    1.2 GB
   └ VM                   VM          3.0 GB   swap

Largest consumers on Macintosh HD - Data:
  312.4 GB  ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/
   84.1 GB  ~/Library/Caches/
   61.7 GB  ~/Documents/
$ broza suggest
Potentially reclaimable space:  234.3 GB
Reported, not reclaimable by Broza: 51.1 GB

SAFE (green) — 138.2 GB
   build-cache      121.4 GB   Xcode DerivedData (94.2 GB), Python bytecode caches (27.2 GB)
   user-cache        16.8 GB   Application caches (16.8 GB)

REVIEW (amber) — 96.1 GB
   duplicates        52.3 GB   Duplicate files (52.3 GB)
   unused-apps       28.7 GB   6 apps not opened in more than 1 year
   old-backups       15.1 GB   2 iPhone backups from 2023
   build-cache          0 B
                               Docker Desktop disk image: 38.6 GB — inform only, see: broza explain build-cache
   snapshots           0 B     4 Time Machine local snapshots (size not reported by macOS)

INFO ONLY (red) — 0 B
   cloud-synced         0 B
                               Already backed up in iCloud Drive: 12.5 GB — inform only, see: broza explain cloud-synced

Next step:
  broza clean --risk green            (dry run, deletes nothing)
  broza clean --risk green --apply    (moves to quarantine; space is freed after expiry or purge)
$ broza clean --risk green
Dry run: nothing was changed.

Would move to quarantine 5122 item(s), 21.6 GB in all:
   planned        3.0 GB  ~/Library/Caches/Google
   planned        2.3 GB  ~/Library/Caches/pnpm
   planned        1.9 GB  ~/Library/Caches/Homebrew
   … and 5119 more

Next step:
  broza clean --risk green --apply    (moves to quarantine; `broza restore` brings items back until they expire)
$ broza clean --risk green --apply

5122 items (21.6 GB), risk SAFE.
  ~/Library/Caches/Google
  ~/Library/Caches/pnpm
  ~/Library/Caches/Homebrew
  ~/Library/Caches/Yarn
  ~/Library/Caches/go-build
Proceed? [y/N] y
Session cln_20260921103608_a1b2: 5122 item(s) moved to quarantine, 21.6 GB pending (freed after expiry or purge).
Quarantine: ~/.local/share/broza/quarantine/cln_20260921103608_a1b2
Undo: broza restore --session cln_20260921103608_a1b2

What it does

An honest map, then a careful trim

Honest map

Physical disks, APFS containers, volumes and their roles, and local snapshots. Purgeable space is never added to free space.

Plain English

broza explain answers three questions for any volume, path or category: what it is, what it is for, and whether it is safe to touch.

Risk-ranked

Ten detectors, sorted into SAFE, REVIEW and INFO ONLY. The label is always written out, so colour is never the only signal.

Dry run first

Nothing is written without --apply, and the System, Preboot, Recovery and VM volumes are never written at all. There is no flag to change that.

30-day undo

Deletions are moves. Items sit in quarantine for 30 days and broza restore puts them back exactly where they were.

Scriptable

Every command has --json with a versioned envelope, stable exit codes 0–9, and no prompt when there is no terminal.

Detectors

What Broza cleans: developer caches, snapshots, backups, duplicates

Category ids are stable and usable in scripts, with --category and --risk. Linked ids have a plain-English guide.

Category	Risk	What it finds
user-cache	SAFE	Application caches, logs and incomplete downloads under ~/Library. Regenerated on demand.
build-cache	SAFE REVIEW	Build artefacts: DerivedData, Archives, orphan node_modules, __pycache__, .gradle, target/.
ios-simulators	REVIEW	Unused iOS simulator runtimes and simulated devices installed by Xcode.
trash	REVIEW	The Trash of every mounted volume. Emptying it is irreversible.
snapshots	REVIEW	APFS local snapshots (Time Machine, OS update). Managed only via tmutil; sizes not reported by macOS.
old-backups	REVIEW	iPhone and iPad backups under ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup.
unused-apps	REVIEW INFO ONLY	Applications not opened past the threshold, plus their leftovers in ~/Library.
cloud-synced	INFO ONLY	Files already synced to iCloud Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive. Reported only, never deleted.
duplicates	REVIEW	Groups of byte-identical files, confirmed by a full content hash.
large-old-files	REVIEW	Large files not opened for a long time, ranked by size.

Safety

Rules that no flag can turn off

Dry run by default.
broza clean only simulates. Nothing changes without --apply.
Quarantine by default.
Every deletion is a move. Irreversible deletion needs --purge and the word PURGE typed in full; --yes does not skip it.
Protected volumes are read-only.
Broza never writes to the System, Preboot, Recovery or VM volumes, and there is no flag that allows it.
Cloud files are reported, never deleted.
Files already synced to iCloud Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive are listed with the provider's own steps for freeing them.

These are enforced by the type system, not by discipline: every mutating function requires an Approved<_> token that only crates/broza/src/safety/guard.rs can construct, so grep -rn "Approved<" crates/ is the whole audit surface.

Free, open source, and staying that way

Broza is MIT-licensed. If it saved you space you can leave a tip — it is a donation, nothing is sold and nothing is unlocked.

Support on Ko-fi Star on GitHub

Your Mac's disk,explained. Then trimmed.