The Best Way To Keep Your Mac Cache Clean

It’s time for obsessive compulsive Mac users to unite, grab the Windex and clean up our favorite computer.

Or, use a good cache cleaner to keep the insides of your Mac running well. After all, a clean Mac is fast Mac, right? Mostly. Still, the Mac is loaded with files and settings which need to be cleaned—dozens of them.

A search for cleaning utilities for Macs will turn up plenty which claim to clean this, remove that, and handle many of the household chores that OS X may take care of while you’re asleep, though your Mac must be turned on to accomplish the automatic cache cleaning tasks.

MacCleanse is one of the more comprehensive utilities available for Mac users to clean logs and cache files.

Unbeknownst to most Mac users, our Macs collect and store information for us; sometimes useful, often not, but collected nonetheless.

For example, your Mac remembers your most recent applications, documents, folders, servers, and URLs.

There’s font caches, temporary files, the trash, user cache files, the clipboard, and more.

Some applications, such as Camino, Firefox, Safari and others collect cookies, download information, page history information, site icons, even passwords, and data field information.

If you use different chat utilities, they leave little trails of icons, conversation history, contact details, and more in various and sundry caches scattered on your Mac.

What happens to all that information? Most of it just sits there, growing, taking up space, though some files can impede your Mac’s performance over time.

MacCleanse gets rid of many of the logs, caches, preferences, that clutter up your Mac’s hard disk. Not only are your Mac’s system files cleansed, many applications leave their own clutter files, which also need to be removed.

Each Mac system is capable of creating logs and caches all over the place—system logs, software update logs, web server access logs, archived logs, Mail logs, installation logs, user logs, crash reporter logs, system caches, and many, many more.

MacCleanse lets you remove them all, or a group of them, or one at a time. In the unlikely event that your Mac’s hard drive is getting full, you can reclaim hundreds of megs of storage space.

Included is the ability to find clutter files left behind by a laundry list of Mac utilities and applications, ranging from AIM, iChat, Firefox, Safari, Skype, and many more.

What’s the advantage of this kind of cleaning? We live in an age when personal privacy is a prime issue for many Mac users, and identity theft is more common. Your Mac stores plenty of personal information in logs, caches, preferences.

Sell your Mac or let a friend, family member, or neighbor use it for awhile, and all that information is available to someone else.

MacCleanse makes it clean, keeps it clean because you get to choose what you want cleaned and when.

MacCleanse may not be the least expensive of such cache cleaning utilities, though it may be the most thorough. Even better is the complete list of everything MacCleanse does, each item that gets cleansed is recorded for your review.

Security is important, so just deleting old files, preferences, caches, and logs is not enough. MacCleanse also securely deletes information, making it nearly impossible to recover, even for experienced hackers.

If peace of mind is important, MacCleanse is a good place to get started. It’s not as though there’s no competition for Mac maintenance utilities.

There’s Leopard Cache Cleaner, Macaroni, Ice Clean, Maintenance, Onyx, and an old favorite, Cocktail. So, what do you use to keep your Mac clean and performing well?