Best Program For Cleaning Mac
It’s spring again, and with the new season comes the age-old ritual of cleaning out things you ignored for most of the year. Far be it from me to suggest that you clean out your basement, garage, or attic, but I would be remiss if I didn’t recommend you take a closer look at the crusty corners of your Mac. Last year, Chris Breen shared valuable Tips for a tidier Mac—all of which are worth revisiting. But I also want to draw your attention to a half-dozen digital dust bunnies that you might not have considered:
1. Get rid of old iChat logs
If you use iChat, you can have the program store logs of your chats. (Go to iChat -> Preferences, click on Messages, select Save Chat Transcripts To, and then choose a folder.) By default, the program saves transcripts in a folder called iChats in your Documents folder, but you can choose a different location to store these files.
Here are the descriptions of the best Mac cleaners that can assist you at profound system cleaning, optimization, and maintenance. Thanks to their specific functions, you will be able to keep your machine in a tip-top shape. Besides, in cleaning the junk, one has to be attentive and cautious not to remove files that are needed. A special cleaner program which is needed in case of mac computers is no other than MacFly Pro – a helpful assistant for routine computer maintenance.
With this preference set, iChat saves a log file of every chat. This is a great idea (and especially helpful at work) if you often need to refresh your memory about a conversation. But if you send images inline during chats, these files may take up a lot of space. If you look inside the iChats folder, you’ll see that the files are organized by date. While you may want to save recent chat logs, you may have months of files you can trash, saving a lot of disk space.
2. Delete application backups
Many programs offer automatic backups, and store copies of files in a selected folder, just as iChat saves chat logs. Two programs I use often—Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit and The Omni Group’s OmniFocus—do this. Some applications, such as OmniFocus, let you choose the location for the backups; others, like BBEdit, don’t. BBEdit stores its backups in a BBEdit Backups folder in my Documents folder; I have OmniFocus store its backups in my Documents folder as well.
If you use any application that saves backups, you may find that it has tucked away several gigabytes of duplicate files, depending on how the program saves them. (BBEdit saves a new backup every time you save a file.) Deleting these backup files can save space, and make searching via OS X’s Spotlight much easier.
While you’re at it, check in youruserfolder/Music/iTunes folder; you may find a Previous Libraries folder, which includes copies of your iTunes libraries that were saved after you installed a new version.
3. Get rid of Mail downloads
When you receive attachments to e-mail messages in Apple’s Mail, the files are stored with your messages at first. But if you double-click an attachment to view it, or if you use QuickLook to glance at it, Mail stores a copy in your youruserfolder/Library/Mail Downloads folder. You may have dozens of files here occupying a huge amount of space. You can generally delete these without worry. If you still have the original messages, the attachments are part of those messages. If not, you may have already saved the attachments to your hard disk.
4. Delete log files
Your Mac stores lots of log files, most of which you never need to review. Open the Console application (in /Applications/Utilities), to see a list in the Console Messages window sidebar.
You can delete many of these files without affecting your Mac, and you can save significant space, since some of these files can be quite large. For instance, in the screenshot above, you can see a number of system.log files. The first one—system.log—is the current file, but the others, with the .bz2 suffix, are archived files.
Delete these files with Titanium Software’s free utility Onyx. Launch the program, click on Cleaning in the toolbar, and then click on the Logs tab. Check System Archived Logs, and then click Execute. While you’re using Onyx, check out the many other files that the program can delete to clear up space on your Mac.
5. Weed out iTunes dupes
If you’re cavalier about how you monitor your iTunes library, you may have a lot of duplicate files. iTunes has a built-in feature to help you find duplicates, to see if you copied some files twice, or if you have the same songs on original albums and others from best-of albums.
To use this feature, choose File -> Display Duplicates. This shows all tracks that share the same name and artist. If you hold down the Option key when you select the File menu, the menu item changes to Display Exact Duplicates. This sorts for duplicates where the name, artist, and album match. Check these files carefully. You may find some that you can get rid of, saving space not only on your Mac, but also on your iPad or iPhone.
Still, iTunes’ duplicate search is limited. Doug Adams’ $15 Dupin gives you much more power to weed out duplicates, sorting by a variety of different criteria. If you add lots of music to your iTunes library, Dupin is a great way to slim it down.
6. Reset Safari
If you use Apple’s Safari, some of the program’s features can take up unnecessary space. For instance, the cache file is intended to make your browsing snappier, but can easily consume hundreds of megabytes. When it gets too big, it can actually slow down browsing. History files can make Spotlight searching sluggish. And Top Sites, Website preview images, and Website icons (favicons) can slow down the program as well.
Every now and then it’s a good idea to reset Safari. Choose Safari -> Reset Safari and check the options that interest you.
I don’t reset or delete everything—you can see my choices in the screenshot above. Choose what’s most important to you, and reset Safari every now and then to speed up your browsing and save disk space.
One last tip: have you looked in your Downloads (youruserfolder/Downloads) folder lately? You may find plenty of unneeded copies of files there too.
Senior contributor Kirk McElhearn writes about more than just Macs on his blog Kirkville. Twitter: @mcelhearn Kirk’s latest book is Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ.
Macs are loved for their reliability and polish. But, like all computers, even Macs tend to slow down with age. When that happens, many people choose the nuclear option: a complete system reinstall. There are cases when a full reinstall is really the best course of action, but using the best Mac cleaner apps is much faster and often just as effective.
Testing most Mac OS X cleaners available, we’ve selected our top 4 favorite free and paid cleaners for your Mac.
Top 4 Best Mac Cleaner Apps in 2019
A great Mac cleaner must support the latest version of Mac OS X, it must be easy to use, and it must deliver on its promises. As much as we like free Mac cleaner apps, we’re not excluding paid cleaners from this list. Often, paid cleaners come with the best features and the most reliable support. Paying a relatively small amount of money for a Mac cleaner makes a lot of sense if it can extend the life of your Mac computer for another year or two.
1. CleanMyMac X
The developers of CleanMyMac know how Macs work; they also know how to clean up a Mac with a click of a button. CleanMyMac monitors the activity of many common Mac apps as well as the operating system itself to remove junk from every inch of your Mac. The Mac cleaner has been in active development for several years now, and its large database of rules, items, and exceptions reflects this. With CleanMyMac, there’s no reason to worry about accidentally removing an important file or corrupting the operating system, making it unusable.
CleanMyMac X features a fantastic one-button cleaning system, which automatically decides which parts of your Mac need to be optimized and which are fine as they are. You can, of course, manually control the cleanup process if you’d rather be behind the steering wheel.
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Besides cleaning, CleanMyMac also comes with handy maintenance and monitoring features. It helps you uninstall apps without leaving any residue files behind, it gathers all your extensions, widgets, and plugins into one simple control panel, securely shreds sensitive files to pieces, and more. You can try CleanMyMac for free, a single Pro license costs $39.95.
2. Disk Drill
Disk Drill is the most popular and user-friendly data recovery tool for Mac, and it also comes with some useful free disk cleaning features. Disk Drill can analyze your storage space and locate unused, large, and duplicate files to free up your storage effortlessly. It can also monitor the health of your storage device and provide you with timely alerts in case it detects early signs of malfunction.
Considering how comprehensive the cleanup features of Disk Drill are, it’s surprising that the software focuses, first and foremost, on data recovery. Indeed, Disk Drill can recover over 300 file formats from all common storage devices with a single click of the Recover button.
If there’s one data recovery tool that can convince anyone that data recovery isn’t as scary as it often seems, it’s Disk Drill. After you launch it, you will see a list of available storage devices. Select the one you want to recover files from and click on the Recover button. Wait for Disk Drill to present you with a list of deleted files and choose which files you’d like to recover.
You can download Disk Drill for free to see what it can do for you. When you’re ready, you can purchase the Pro version along with lifetime upgrades for a very attractive price. All disk clean-up and duplicate finder features within Disk Drill are free.
3. Onyx
Onyx is a versatile Mac OS X maintenance and cleanup utility that can verify the structure of the file system on the startup volume, repair disk permissions, configure certain parameters hidden from the system and from certain apps, empty system, user, Internet, and font caches, forcefully empty the trash, rebuild Launch Services, CoreDuet database, Spotlight and Mail indexes, and more. These features make it one of the best free Mac cleaner apps.
Onyx was created in 2003 by Joël Barrière, who is known on the Internet as Titanium. In the early days, Onyx was intended chiefly for Barrière’s personal use, but it was also available for free for everyone who wanted to try it out. Soon, users started requesting features, and Barrière started taking users’ suggestions and requests into consideration, regularly releasing new updates and bug fixes.
Onyx is available in several different versions, each compatible with a specific version of the Mac OS X operating system. The software only works correctly when it’s installed on the supported version of Mac OS X. As a free Mac cleaner, Onyx accomplishes a lot without asking for anything in return. We recommend it not just as a Mac cleaner but also as a general maintenance tool.
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4. AppCleaner
It’s up to each app developer to make the uninstall process as clean and thorough as possible. Unfortunately, not all app developers can or are willing to, ensure that their apps don’t leave any reside files behind.
Luckily, there are apps such as AppCleaner, which solves the issue elegantly and for free. AppCleaner is a small utility with only a single screen, where you can drop installed apps. Anytime you drop an app onto the AppCleaner, the utility automatically finds all files associated with the app you want to delete and removes them.
It’s important to remember to use AppCleaner every time you want to delete an app from your Mac. Doing so will greatly reduce the number of junk files on your computer, helping it work as new for a long time.
What Is Mac Cleaner and How It Works
A Mac cleaner is an app designed to speed up your Mac computer, making it as fast as brand new. To understand how Mac cleaners work, you need to understand why Macs become slower with age:
Lack of Free Storage Space
Perhaps the most common cause of Mac slowdowns is the lack of free storage space. It’s, unfortunately, no secret that Apple charges a premium for large storage devices. Base models are usually offered with much less storage space than comparable Windows or Android devices. The Mac OS X operating system alone takes around 10 GB of space, and large apps and games such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, World of Warships, or War Thunder make the number skyrocket.
Without any free storage space, Macs have nowhere to store temporary files, which can cause the entire operating system as well as all apps to come to a crawl.
Mac cleaners address this problem by deleting the leftover system and app files. They also help users identify large files and folders and either delete them or move them elsewhere.
Best Program For Cleaning Up Mac
Stale Caches and Temporary Files
The Mac OS X operating system stores a lot of information locally to improve loading times and make websites and apps more responsive. Sometimes, the locally stored data become outdated, potentially causing all sorts of issues. This most commonly happens when browsing the Web.
Most Mac cleaners allow you to quickly and easily empty stale caches and delete old temporary files, which causes websites and apps to send you the latest copies of data. You could, for the most part, achieve the same results even without a Mac cleaner, but it would take you a long time to accomplish what Mac cleaners do with a press of a button.
Startup Background Processes
Every time you boot up your Mac computer, multiple critical, as well as non-essential system processes, load in the background. The problem is that some apps are designed to behave in the same way — even if there’s no good reason for them to start automatically in the background! What’s more, these apps continue to run in the background until you manually close them, eating up your precious hardware resources.
Best Program For Cleaning Mac
If you want a clean Mac, make sure to identify all processes that automatically start in the background and only keep those you really need. A good Mac cleaner can identify startup processes with a significant negative impact on the boot time and disable them.