Chosen Solution
My Mac hard drive is badly cluttered and I suspect lots of junk is accumulated on my drive. How can I clean this Mac safely?
Best to use some Apps here to do the job. But before you start make sure you have a good backup! I would start off with this: Disk Doctor It will do most of the heavy lifting here deleting your old files.I would then use an external bootable drive to boot the system up from so I could then use Apples Disk Utility to repair the permissions and the disk its self. You may need to run it though a few times to clean everything.The next tool here is a HD drive defrager (not needed with SSD’s). It re-connects the file fragments back together as they do tend to get scattered around the disk more so when the disk is full. The last thing I would do here is clear out any old files so I have at least 1/4 to 1/3 of the disk free. This will minimize file fraging and will offer your system needed swap space. You may also want to think about upping the RAM to 8GB if it isn’t already and review what is running within Activity Monitor. I would be careful here stopping or deleting processes until you understand what it is doing and which app it maybe part of.
You should try some free tips to clean up & Speed up slow Mac Use Finder«Go«Go to folder«/Library/caches and clear all caches files from itUse Finder«Go«Go to folder«/Library/Logs and clear all logs files from itUse Finder«Go«Go to folder«Applications and drag unwanted apps, software to trashUse Finder«Go«Go to folder«Widgets and drag non Apple and sluggish widgets to trashDrag all useless downloads from Download folder to trashSend all Duplicate files to trash*Using Activity Monitor«Quit unresponsive appsEmpty all files from TrashCut down number of apps icon from Desktop as well as DockStop all animation on Mac OS XDelete Leftovers of Uninstalled applications To remove duplicate files from Mac you can free download Stellar Smart Finder or Duplicate Finder for Mac.
Disclaimer: as always, backup important files, folders and configurations as needed. I find the easiest, fastest way is to use GrandPerspective. Free, lightweight and been using it for years now with excellent results every time. It shows your drive in a graphical way so you can immediately see which files or folders are occupying the most space on your drive, or any folder you choose. Download from: http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net For uninstalling programs you no longer need you can use AppCleaner, from FreeMacSoft. Same as before, it’s free, lightweight and I been personally using it for years now with excellent results. It gets rid of all the extra files the apps install. Download from: http://www.freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/ Using Finder track down all “deletable” files you’ve created or downloaded and move them to the trash (don’t delete system files like Library folders and such). Deleting from your home folder should be safe enough. Empty all your Trash cans (from Mail, iPhoto, Finder) If that is not enough I recommend manually backing up whatever is important to another drive and doing an erase and install of OS X. Guide here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201376
When I use your MacBook for a while, I will find it runs very slowly. At this time I need to clean up its storage space to improve the running speed. Here’s how to do this! You can clean up your storage space in a few ways:
- Clean up the cache
- Uninstall applications that are not in use
- Delete old email attachments
- Empty the trash can
- Delete large files and old files
- Delete old iOS backups
- Erase language files
- Delete old DMG and IPSW
- Remove duplicates 10.Organize your desktop In fact, cleaning up separately according to the above is a very troublesome thing, so I recommend you can use the Mac Cleaner under the iMyMac website to clean up. It combines the above ten functions with one software. This is a piece of software that I have used recently to clean up my Mac.
Just use a mac uninstaller and create a huge of free space by removing unwanted files and folders.
