Mar 23, 2020 That’s why you may need a Mac cleaner software which can help you free up a decent amount of disk space in just a few minutes. After carefully testing and reviewing 16 Mac cleaning apps, we believe that CleanMyMac is the best utility for most people, as it offers a great combination of useful features with a super sleek interface. 3 months free with 1-year plan. In addition to cleaning up junk files to speed up the system speed, this software can also protect your privacy, it can clear all your internet explorer history.
Apr 02, 2020 Nevertheless, Data Rescue is not really a Mac Cleaner, it can optimize through and clean up poorly performing files inside your Mac and other system areas that cause performance issues. We have just discovered the best 5 Mac cleaners for 2020 above. We hope that this article has helped you in your search for finding the best software that suits. 5 FREE Mac Cleaning Software. Being an Apple products aficionado, and to keep them in good condition, I’ve been using many cleaning apps for my iPhone and MacBook. I’m listing some of the free Mac Cleaning Softwares and applications for you guys out there who have clogged up.
So you’ve had your Mac for a while, and things don’t feel as fresh and clean as they used to? Although Macs don’t require a lot of maintenance for cleaning, those temporary files, app leftovers, and system cache do accumulate. These files may slow down your machine and take up a lot of valuable space. In this article, we share quick and easy ways to clean up your MacBook. Let’s get started!
How to clean your Mac automatically
Here’s a simple diagram to explain the most common types of computer junk, sorted by size. Some of these, like Trash bin files, are easily reachable, while others are stored away in hidden system folders. Sadly, there’s no easy way to clear them up without special skills.
If you don’t feel like spending the next several hours cleaning your Mac manually, you can use a powerful cleaning tool CleanMyMac X to find and remove all the clutter your Mac contains. It knows which files are useless, how to find them and remove completely. CleanMyMac has everything to finish the 3-hour task of a Mac cleanup in under 5 minutes. It will even clean up the junk you didn’t know about and give your computer a speed boost.
How to clean up system storage on Mac with CleanMyMac X:
- Download CleanMyMac X for free here.
- Run the app and go to System Junk.
- Click Scan.
- Press Clean to get rid of all junk.
Done! Now your Mac looks much better!
How to Clean Mac Hard Drive Manually
If you never performed an automatic or manual system cleaning — it means that your Mac has been collecting unnecessary files and clutter for years. You can quickly clean up your Mac with these easy steps.
1. Clean up cache
You’ve probably heard “Remove your cache” as a web browser troubleshooting tip. In fact, your Mac stores a lot of information in files called caches, allowing fast access to that data and reducing the need to get it from the original source again. Unfortunately, those files take a lot of space on your Mac, and instead of speeding the things up, they slow your computer down. Therefore, if you want to give your system a boost, clean your Mac from the cache files.
There are two ways to do that: you can delete them manually or use a MacBook cleaner like CleanMyMac X to do the job for you. Of course, the second way is an easy and fast one. However, if you decide to clean up the cache manually, check out a comprehensive guide on “How to Clear Cache on a Mac.”
2. Uninstall apps you don’t use
The applications you’ve installed on your Mac take up space, of course. And over time when your Mac becomes full of different apps, it may start running slowly. How to clean MacBook? In the first place, you need to remove the apps you no longer use or need. To do this, right-click on the app you want to remove and choose Move to Bin.
You may be surprised to find out that sending an app to the Trash will not uninstall it completely because the app leftovers still remain on your Mac taking up a lot of storage. So, if you want to be a responsible Mac user, you need to uninstall applications the right way. Here’s a step-by-step guide on “How to Uninstall Apps on a Mac.”
Extra step: Trim down your login items
Login items are applications that run automatically upon startup. Nowadays, every second app tries to become as prominent as possible and get into your Login Items. First of all, you may not even know what they are (not all of them appear in the Dock). Secondly, such apps consume memory. That's enough reasons to get rid of extra login items you don't need.
- Open System Preferences.
- Go to Users & Groups.
- Choose your nickname on the right.
- Choose the Login Items tab.
- Check startup programs you want to remove.
- Press the “–” sign below.
You’re done.
3. Remove old Mail Attachments
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You get different attachments via email — PDFs, Word Documents, images, etc. Sometimes we all make a mistake of double-clicking the file. When you do that, the file saves itself to your Mail Downloads folder. Double click enough files and that folder can blow up like a balloon. That’s why you need to remove old Mail Downloads.
How to do that? How to clean my Mac? The easiest way is to use Spotlight. Press Command+Space to make the search field appear and type Mail Downloads. In the Folders section, you’ll see the Mail Downloads folder. Once you get to the folder, you can select the files and delete them. Make sure to check and empty it every year or so.
4. Empty the trash
Even though you’ve deleted the files, they reside in your Trash bin taking up a lot of storage on your Mac. They are just waiting to be removed completely. If you want your precious hard drive space back, you need to empty the Trash.
Here’s how to clean your MacBook from the trash:
- Click and hold on the Trash can icon in the Dock.
- Click Empty and then Empty Bin.
The process is quite simple, right? There is even a more effortless way to clear Trash. CleanMyMac X scans your Mac for junk and lets you remove all trashed files. To do that, launch CleanMyMac X and press Scan. When the scan is completed, click Review Details to see what exactly CleanMyMac X has found.
I’ve already cleaned Bin a couple of weeks before, but over some time, almost a gigabyte of trashed files has accumulated. Now, I can simply click Back to Summary and then Run to clean Trash and system junk.
5. Reduce clutter
Apple has already thought about the clutter that can be generated on the Macs and provided a possible solution. Here’s how to reduce clutter on your Mac:
- Go to the Apple menu.
- Choose About This Mac and then Storage. Here you can see how much free space is left on your computer.
- Then click Manage.
Here’re some recommendations for saving space on your Mac. You can choose Review Files to examine apps, documents, and other files that are stored on your Mac.
You can choose any file in every category (Applications, Bin, Documents, etc.) and click Delete to remove it and optimize space. Look through other recommendations and make the necessary changes to use your Mac’s space more efficiently.
6. Delete large and old files
It has always been a rule of thumb among computer geeks, that you should keep a minimum of 15-20% of free space on your main hard drive. This is just a rough estimation, but the more free space you have, the faster your Mac works. A computer magazine once performed a test on this, which concluded that the difference in speed can reach as much as 35%. If you work with heavy graphics or video rendering, even more free space is recommended.
How to have more free space? Delete large and old files.
The first way is totally manual and requires you to find them one by one, while for the second way, you just need to make two clicks and CleanMyMac X will do the job for you.
How to clean up Mac with CleanMyMac X:
- Download CleanMyMac X (a link to a free edition of the app)
- Launch the program.
- Go to the Large and Old Files section on the menu.
- Click Scan.
- Review the details, select what to clean and then click Clean.
That’s it!
7. Remove old iOS backups
Having your files backed up is a wonderful thing. But over time your Mac becomes overloaded with old backups that take gigabytes of storage on your hard drive. That’s why you should consider removing the old iOS backups you no longer need.
Each backup remains stored on your computer and is accessible via iTunes. To delete the old backups, you need to do the following:
- Choose the Apple menu and then select About This Mac.
- Go to the Storage tab and click Manage.
- Here, choose iOS Files.
- Select the backup you want to remove and click Delete.
- Confirm and you’re done!
That’s it! The backup files are gone from your Mac forever.
8. Wipe out Language files
Unused language localizations take up about 1 GB of storage space. Mac applications come with language files for every language they support. It allows starting using the app in that language immediately. Cool, right? Not always. Just consider: when was the last time you used the app in Bengali or Korean? Since you don’t speak those languages, such files just waste space on your Mac. You need to remove the unnecessary language files and clean MacBook from that clutter.
How to delete the language files? Go to Finder > Applications, then right-click the app which language files you want to remove and choose Show Package Contents. Open the Resources folder and then find folders ending with “.lproj.” Every folder contains language files for one particular language. Note that for every app you should manually find and select the files to remove. But there is an automatic way to delete the language files that will save you tons of time — CleanMyMac X. Just download the application (for free) and it will do the job for you.
9. Delete old DMGs
Disk images (DMGs) often take up valuable space on your Mac. Here’s how to perform a Mac cleanup and get rid of those files:
- Open Finder and type “disk image” in the search bar.
- Then delete all files that have .dmg extensions. Don’t forget to remove them from Trash as well.
CleanMyMac X allows you to locate and delete DMGs quicker. With its System Junk module you can remove unused disk image in the single click of a button:
Just press Clean and it’s done!
10. Remove duplicates
Useless copies of your documents, files, and photos eat up your Mac’s precious space. Therefore, if you wonder how to clean up a Mac and boost its performance, try to delete the duplicates. Note that the process of finding and removing the duplicates requires either a lot of patience and time (if you decide to delete them manually) or a duplicate finder app. Whatever method you choose, make sure to check out this article on “How to Find Duplicates on Mac.”
11. Tidy up your desktop
Many people use Desktop as their primary destination for files. But this could be tricky because your OS treats every file on a desktop as an active window. When items on your desktop are too many, Finder gets substantially slower. This leads us to the most compelling advice in this article — cleaning up desktop does miracles!
Rather than just leaving every file on your desktop, organize them into folders. The latest macOS does that automatically thanks to the Stacks feature. You can also use Google Drive, Dropbox or any external storage device to save your files and keep your desktop tidy.
12. Clean your Mac’s keyboard
Our last but not least advice is to wipe your Mac’s keyboard. As you use your keyboard daily, it quickly gets dirty. Moreover, all those crumbs may live under the keys forever!
If you were wondering how to clean Mac’s keyboard, there are no special rules here. You can try blowing the dust and other particles out of your keyboard once in a while. Disinfecting wipes and alcohol-based sprays may also prove useful. Just choose the piece of fabric and wipe the keys gently to make them clean and shiny!
All in all, be careful with your system files. Don’t delete things you’re not sure about. If you are not completely confident that you can manage the task by yourself, better use a dedicated utility like CleanMyMac X to get a fresh and clean Mac in just two clicks. Here's the video describing quick tips to clean up your Mac:
Happy cleaning!
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In my opinion, only about 20 percent of an app’s features should be considered premium features that users should have to pay for. However, In most cases, users really only need the other 80 percent of features which should be free. But, to get those useful 80 percent of features, users have to dig into their pockets and pay for the 20 percent of features they don’t really need.
For CleanMyMac, a disk cleaner, which part is the 80 percent you should have gotten for free? Is there an app that provides that 80 percent?
Of course, there is. I’d like to recommend Trend Micro’s Cleaner One Pro, a free app that’s comparable with CleanMyMac.
Let’s see what functions CleanMyMac provides to its subscribers that Cleaner One Pro also provides, while pointing out features in CleanMyMac that might create problems or aren’t that necessary for the average user.
1. System Junk
“System” as defined by CleanMyMac includes user cache files, system log files, as well as the application language packs. The latest version of Cleaner One Pro supports the cleanup of user cache and system files, but stops at removing application language packs due to safety considerations: for certain software, there might be program errors once the language pack is removed. Moreover, a single language pack is very small and does not significantly affect the entire disk space.
2. Photo Junk
When iPhoto users synchronize their phone camera with the computer terminal, it creates residual cache files that speed up photo browsing for the user, but also increases the burden on disk by using up space.
We can say that this kind of space consumption is a double-edged sword, since browsing is speeded up. But for infrequent iPhoto users, this feature is somewhat superfluous. You get this feature as one of CleanMyMac’s value-added services, while Cleaner One Pro merges this function into the iTunes cache-cleaning function, because this function is too simple to separate out for display.
3. Mail Attachments
When using the Mail app on the Mac, you can accumulate a lot of attachments over time. As you can see, these attachments are located in CleanMyMac, but did you know there is a risk when cleaning mail attachments? Once you have removed a mail attachment and are unable to sync to your mail server, you cannot get them back. In Cleaner One Pro, we designed mail caches into the Junk Files feature which does not affect your mail attachments.
4. Large Files
Large file scanning is a very useful feature. Users tend to ignore what they have downloaded, such as large software installation packages or movies. These large files can account for half of the disposable space of the disk. This function can indeed become a paid-for function, as it is with CleanMyMac, but in exchange for the support of its users, Cleaner One Pro provides this valuable function for free. With Cleaner One Pro you can also lock some files that you don’t want to remove in case you want to make sure you do not delete important files.
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5. Disk Map
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We think it is user-friendly to help you manage all the files on your hard disk using a visual map, so we added the Disk Map feature into Cleaner One Pro for free. However, no functions like this can be found in CleanMyMac.
Disk Map quickly scans your drive and builds an amazing visualization of all the files and folders on your computer, allowing you to easily navigate the system and find the content that takes up the most space.
In addition, all folders and files under the home folder are listed out by size. As for some system-required critical files, deleting them would provide a prompt that those are important and are not allowed to be removed. With the Disk Map feature you can also find out when a file or folder was created, modified or last opened. Furthermore, hovering your mouse on one folder then clicking the magnifier icon will direct you to the file location.
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Conclusion
Is Cleaner One Pro worth trying? Absolutely, yes! Don’t hesitate. It not only cleans up your disk space but also solves other Mac issues you might have. In addition, we are also the least expensive cleaning app on macOS. If you still cannot afford it, you can call your friends or family to share the cost. Thanks Apple for letting us share wonderful applications together via family sharing. Regardless if you are new to the Mac or an advanced user, Cleaner One Pro will be a good choice for you. While Cleaner One Pro can help you free up a lot of space, please don’t forget to back up your important files, in case an unfortunate event happens like your hard disk malfunctions. We regard customers’ data security as the most important thing. I hope you will have fun with Cleaner One Pro in the future!
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Thanks for taking the time to read my article. How do you like Cleaner One Pro? Do you have any other questions or suggestions? We are trying our best to meet more needs of our users. Leave your comments here. We are always happy to hear from you.