The Best Way To Keep Your Mac Cache Clean

Thursday, October 23, 2008 | Tips and Tricks | Read or Post a Comment

Cleanse 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.... (excerpted).

6 Reader Comments

john said:

I’ve been using Applejack as well.
But you can also use the CLI command atsutil in the Terminl.app like this: atsutil databases –remove, you have do his as root
5’ve added this line to the rc.common script, so now everytime i reboot my caches are cleaned.

Jared said:

Wow! I just went ahead and bought Mac Cleanse and checked everything. I have owned my 1st generation Quad Mac Pro for over two years now and have never really cleaned much up on it.

I even checked the option to have the program over write three times and I got a message saying it would take much longer.

Well Mac Cleanse was done in about 20 seconds and it cleaned up a little over three gigabytes of hard drive space. I did not know I had that much crap lagging me down.

My Pro was still fast before I cleaned, now it’s like the day I took it out of the box! My Ferrari just got a tune up and I like it. I am holding Mac-360 responsible for all internet speeding tickets I get! LOL.

It’s worth the $20.00 bucks people!

Thanks Alexis!

MacSmiley said:

George Brickner is right. Applejack works in Single User Mode, not in the Terminal. If you’re using Applejack in the Terminal, you’re looking for trouble.

I prefer MainMenu for convenience.

However, there is one advantage to Applejack that no GUI-based cache cleaner has:

When your Mac won’t boot, or if it freezes when you launch any application… I know… rare, but possible… then Applejack bypasses that whole mess and gets right down to business for you. And it does that without an Install Disk.

Applejack is not for the faint of heart. But it’s indispensible to have in your maintenance arsenal when you need it. You’ve gotta restart anyway, one way or another.

Candy Man said:

AppleJack is a good utility to have, but more for those Mac users who are comfortable with the Terminal. OS X, contrary to popular belief, NEEDS to have some caches cleaned, and log files either archived or deleted. It does NOT do it automatically. What I like about utilities such as Mac Cleanse is that it also works on non OS X apps which also have cache files, log files, and other trails of existence. Good find. Keep up the good work.

stanley said:

That’s a good list of some excellent utilities, most of which do far more than just clean cache files and logs.

The idea of keeping your Mac “clean” goes beyond just tidy, and touches on the heart of identity theft and personal privacy. Those utilities help keep your Mac’s content scrubbed and away from the prying eyes of others, whether in your own home, or from the internet.

George Brickner said:

I’ve been using AppleJack to clean my caches and other things (see http://applejack.sourceforge.net).
You must run AppleJack in single user mode (and if you don’t know what that means, then you shouldn’t use AppleJack).

—
George

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