Second Wind

Give your Mac room to breathe.

Second Wind is an offline-first macOS 15+ app for reviewing known cleanup candidates and making deliberate storage changes. It is independently implemented and has no remote telemetry, analytics, cloud sync, remote rule downloads, or update checks.

1.0.0 Stable Foundation — The reviewed cleanup workflow, Recovery model, local history, persistence schemas, Prometheus metrics, and JSON API v1 now have an explicit compatibility contract. Downloads are currently ad-hoc signed and not notarized, so macOS may require Open Anyway on first launch.

Second Wind is intentionally conservative. It only acts on locations it explicitly understands. Unknown or ambiguous data is left untouched rather than guessed at.

Latest update · 2 August 2026 Second Wind 1.0 establishes versioned local formats, migration safeguards, stable observability responses, documented installation, and a reproducible release archive without adding another storage or cleanup subsystem. Read the update history.

Read the project's philosophy for the principles behind those choices.

In the app

Local observability

License

Copyright © 2026 Ian Hanna. Second Wind is licensed under GPL-3.0-only.

Quick start

Download Second-Wind-1.0.0.zip from GitHub Releases, verify it against SHA256SUMS, move Second Wind.app to /Applications, and follow the installation guide. Second Wind requires macOS 15 or later.

To build the current source instead:

git clone https://github.com/IanHanna12/secondWind.git
cd secondWind
./Scripts/run-debug-app.sh

This launches the standard app without the optional privileged helper enabled.

The v1 stability contract documents persistence, API, migration, upgrading, uninstalling, limitations, and best-effort support.

What it helps with

• Review storage that Second Wind knows how to handle.
• Move reviewed items to Finder Trash or keep them in local Recovery storage.
• Track changes in the storage areas it understands.
• Explain known Applications, Downloads, Documents, Desktop, developer storage, caches, logs, and Recovery storage without presenting them as automatic cleanup targets.
• Inspect installed apps, their exact known support paths, and possible identifier-based orphaned data. Only exact third-party cache and log paths can enter the reviewed cleanup plan; Apple-owned identifiers and data-bearing locations remain protected.
• Check a validated local volume with macOS's read-only verification.

Storage intelligence

Each completed scan records a local inventory of the locations Second Wind explicitly understands. The Storage history view groups that inventory into categories, shows the concrete paths behind a category, and compares it with the previous scan. It can therefore describe observed growth, shrinkage, and items that are no longer observed without guessing what macOS's protected or unknown storage contains.

Recommendations are deterministic explanations of known, eligible items. They never select, move, or delete anything on their own.

Application storage

Applications is a read-only projection of that same inventory: it separates an application bundle from its known related storage, such as support data, caches, logs, preferences, containers, and developer data. Each relationship includes its path and association reason. Exact bundle-identifier paths can be shown as possible orphaned data when the corresponding application is not installed. Only third-party cache and log paths may enter the normal reviewed cleanup plan; Apple-owned identifiers, Application Support, Containers, Preferences, saved state, name matches, ambiguous paths, shared resources, and unknown locations remain protected. Application-specific selection only adds existing, eligible findings to the normal review, confirmation, Trash, or Recovery flow.

Guarantees and limits

Second Wind is designed to reduce risk, not eliminate it. Keep current backups before using any software that can move files.

• Everything stays on your Mac. No account or network service is required.
• All changes are reviewed and explicitly confirmed before execution. Nothing is deleted automatically.
• Recovery items remain locally recoverable until you decide otherwise.
• Ambiguous or sensitive locations stay protected rather than being guessed at.
• Storage recommendations are deterministic local rules; they explain a known location, size, and—when available—its local modification date.
• It does not promise to speed up your Mac, clean RAM, or invent system-health scores.

Optional privileged helper

The standard app does not need a privileged helper. The Xcode App scheme can build one for rebuilding this Mac's startup-volume Spotlight index, running fixed periodic scripts on macOS versions that still provide them, and moving a verified administrator-owned app from /Applications into the current user's Trash. It remains inactive until the user enables it in System tasks and approves it in System Settings. It accepts neither command text nor arbitrary paths.

To test it locally, open Xcode/SecondWind.xcworkspace, select the same signing team for both targets, build the App scheme, then enable the helper from System tasks. See the helper notes for its boundary and local test path.

Optional local observability

The observability directory contains a completely standalone local companion for Prometheus and Grafana. It reads only existing local snapshots, Recovery manifests, and activity records, then serves an immutable aggregate view on 127.0.0.1.

The included dashboard separates scan-snapshot storage from live Recovery storage and reports allocated disk usage, so sparse files are not represented by their potentially much larger logical capacity.

It is disabled unless started deliberately, exposes no mutation endpoints, and never exports paths, file names, user names, Recovery references, arbitrary rule names, or application identities. The Second Wind app does not depend on it and behaves identically when it is absent or stopped.

Development

swift build --disable-sandbox --scratch-path .build/secondwind-debug
swift test --disable-sandbox --scratch-path .build/secondwind-debug

For the GUI app, use:

./Scripts/run-debug-app.sh

Xcode app build and packaging

The Xcode directory contains the checked-in Xcode project, the App scheme, and the optional helper target. It also documents the path for local signing and later direct distribution.