How To Clean Your Mac, Save Disk Space, Remove Files, And Maintain Your Privacy

Backing up your Mac might be the single most important maintenance you can do. My last backup revealed a startling statistic.

The Mac was loaded up with over one million files that needed to be copied to an external disk. One million? I decided to do a little Mac housekeeping and brought in a digital cleaning agent to do the deed.

A Clean Car Runs Better

My father once taught me that a clean car would run better. At the time I didn’t understand, but it was his way of getting me to clean the care (while he took care of maintenance).

Today’s Macs get cleaned differently than an automobile. We won’t hose off or scrub down a Mac.

But a Mac is full of hundreds of thousands of files, and getting rid of those you don’t need can improve performance, save disk space, and enhance your personal privacy.

One of the half dozen utilities on my Mac is MacCleanse, kind of a hat trick of tools to keep the Mac working properly.

The official feature list is dozens and dozens of cleaning actions long, but lumped into three areas. Deleting unneeded files to reclaim disk space. Safely and securely removing files you won’t need or miss. And, cleansing the Mac of files which ensure that your personal information is deleted and not visible to prying eyes.

Open MacCleanse and here’s what you see.

The overview is a good place to start as it displays areas on your Mac that could use a digital scrubbing.

MacCleanse’s sidebar displays additional cleaning options, including caches, downloads, iMessage (and other messaging apps which leave a trail of conversations), logs, and much more.

There’s an option to uninstall applications on your Mac, remove unnecessary language files (these take up a lot of space), and secure erase files you won’t want to be found by anyone else.

On Macs with plenty of applications, it’s possible that MacCleanse can save hundreds of megabytes of storage. It kills and deletes browser cookies and history, empties log files, and gives you options to remove files from third party applications.

My Mac’s file count had churned upwards to over 1.1-million files. After running MacCleanse, removing some unused apps, cleaning out logs and caches, and reducing the number of language files, I’d saved almost two gigabytes of storage and the backup file count when down to just over 900,000.

Does the Mac run better after cleaning? At least as much as my father’s car ran better after I washed it.

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