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Cleaning my Mac
- Thread starter JetBlack7
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Download and run OmniDiskSweeper (its free) It will provide a sorted list of your files/folders and show you where all your space is going. It includes system and hidden folders.
From there you can see what's being consumer and whether its safe to remove. I'd avoid removing any folders or files on the root or within any of the system folders.
From there you can see what's being consumer and whether its safe to remove. I'd avoid removing any folders or files on the root or within any of the system folders.
Do not, whatever you do, try to use CleanMyMac - you are likelyto wind up with an unbootable system.
I laugh whenever I read this. It's always such an uneducated posting.
It's like the people who used to always say "Don't run McAffee Antivirus, it'll delete everything even that's not a virus". .. . there's no logic to that.
CleanMyMac isn't amazing, but it's acceptable. They have highly skilled developers writing the program and updates to make sure it's looking and cleaning things that WON'T cause your computer to not boot.
But hey, you can listen to this guy who says that using software which has sold tens of thousands of copies will crash your computer if you want.
What about the recent thread where someone used CMM and resulted in an awful mess?
Freeing up drive space in Mac OS X
Yes, there have been several.
I would not recommend using CleanMyMac or any of its variants, based on the number of complaints that have been posted in this forum and elsewhere. As an example: CleanMyMac cleaned too much. Here's a recent example. While you may not have experienced problems yet, enough people have that it's wise to avoid it, especially since there are free alternatives that have better reputations, such as Onyx.
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. Most only 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. In fact, deleting some caches 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.
Yeah, just like someone always manages to brick their phone doing a software update while millions don't have any issue.
Don't let yellow journalism and sensationalist rumors\reports lead you to live life in fear.
It's neither yellow journalism nor sensationalist rumors. There have been many, many reports by average users describing problems they've had with such apps. There have been enough negative reports that it's appropriate to warn users to exercise extreme caution or avoidance, especially since such apps are, at best, unnecessary.
Not really. 25,000 people die each year in the US of the flu. Yeah, that's a lot of people. If they all posted in a forum it'd seem like everyone dies of the flu. But there are 350,000,000 Americans, most of who get the flu each year, and don't die.
Your logic is so completely flawed.
We're not talking about flu, but about software. Such apps are unnecessary and potentially harmful. There are other apps that perform many, if not most, of the same functions, such as OnyX. You don't see the high number of complaints about OnyX that you do about CMM, and yet it's very likely that OnyX, which is free, has a larger number of users than CMM. There is no flaw in the logic that if an app has a questionable reputation, as does CMM, and that app is not needed to begin with, it's wise to avoid it. Do what you want, but I could not, in good conscience, fail to warn users about the potential pitfalls associated with apps like CMM. Of course, I have no vested interest in who buys or uses any particular app, but I realize that may not be true for everyone.
I can recommend SupaView to get a nice visual overview of what's on your harddrive.
http://twinside.free.fr/supaview/
http://twinside.free.fr/supaview/