How to Safely Remove Log Files

When analyzing the log files, it’s worth keeping one important aspect in mind: anything over 1GB indicates a problem. If you notice an increase in log file size, it is time to launch Console and check the crash logs. The search field can be used to quickly access data from all the logs.

As log files typically don’t occupy too much space on your Mac, it is recommended that your computer is backed up before clearing any logs. In the /var/log folder are the system logs, which are worth keeping an eye on. The “asl” folder contains the Mac’s automatic maintenance script logs, which should only involve dates from the past week or so. If there are many more then it means the automatic maintenance scripts aren’t working, so empty the oldest one, select the system.log and/or system.log.0.bz2, etc. files, and delete them all except the system.log file. This specific file is the current version;  the system.log.0.bz2, etc., files are the “archived” and compressed previous versions, usually one per day or the like.

Yes, any log files located in the ~/Library/Logs folder can be removed without danger. Actually, if you are using a Mac maintenance app such as CleanMyMac or OnyX, it will do this for you when you clean up your machine to free up any space. However, it’s worth mentioning that there is no actual benefit to removing log files unless, that is, every last megabyte of space is critical. If space becomes a problem, however, you should focus on much bigger files than logs, and so deleting log files won’t speed up your Mac.