I've had an iMac for 2 years. Is there any need to clean up the hard drive of unneeded files? With Windows there was one for that and to defragment the hard drive. Thanks.
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Are "cleanup" apps even needed?
- Thread starter thebignewt
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Nope in the terms of defragging. To through away stuff you have accumulated over the years you no longer need, sure
Though I am sure GGJ will be along shortly to provide a more detailed reason as to why to make up for my succinctness
Though I am sure GGJ will be along shortly to provide a more detailed reason as to why to make up for my succinctness
You don't need to defrag an SSD
edit: Not sure if you have one or not but posting this to make sure.
edit: Not sure if you have one or not but posting this to make sure.
You don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Some remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space, with the risk of deleting something important in the process.
These apps will not make your Mac run faster or more efficiently, since having stuff stored on a drive does not impact performance, unless you're running out of drive space. Some of these apps delete caches, which can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt.
Many of these tasks should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance.
Mac OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software. Among other things, it has its own maintenance scripts that run silently in the background on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, without user intervention.
With very few exceptions, you don't need to defrag on Mac OS X, except possibly when partitioning a drive.
About disk optimization with Mac OS X
Thanks very much for that reply. I had looked at some Mac magazine at a store, and right at the beginning they were pimping CleanMyMac as the second coming of the Bible. Glad I didn't waste my money. I've got a 1 TB hard drive that's only 25% full, mostly music and movies and photos. With Windows I was led to believe that cleaning and defragmenting was important. Some sales crook at Best Buy even tried to charge me $70 to "erase temp files and optimize your drive" because my under warranty Windows machine was overheating! I got out of there ASAP.