How to use CleanMyMac to delete old files and speed up your Mac

CleanMyMac provides a wide range of different tools, but they’re organized into five main categories, which are listed in the sidebar on the left-hand side of the app’s main window. These categories are Cleanup, Protection, Performance, Applications and My Clutter (the icons for each category aren’t labelled, but there’s a tool tip that appears when you hover your mouse over each icon).

There’s also one other option available when you first launch the app, called Smart Care. This allows the app to automatically scan your Mac and make suggestions for all the different types of files that you can delete to save space, as well as other options for boosting your Mac’s performance. When the app has finished scanning your Mac it displays the results as a set of five ‘tiles’, which reflect the five main categories of tools within the program, so let’s take a closer look at those now.

Top of the list in the sidebar is the Cleanup category. There are four tools in here, with each tool represented by a ‘tile’ that shows a quick summary of its results and the files that it has found. One of the most important tools is System Junk, which deals with those mysterious ‘system data’ files that can be found scattered around various locations on your Mac’s drive. Fortunately, CleanMyMac knows where to look for these files – and, most importantly, it knows how to delete system junk without affecting important files that your Mac needs in order to run properly.

There’s a Trash Bins tool that can empty your main Bin, but – if you give it permission – it can also quickly clear out the trash bins that are included within apps like Photos or Mail too. The app can also locate multiple versions of ‘binaries’ (programs) and documents that may be taking up extra space.

Each tile within CleanMyMac shows you a quick summary of the files that it has found, and you can quickly delete those files simply by pressing the ‘Clean’ button. However, there’s also a ‘Review’ button for each tile that lets you delve a little deeper and shows you more details about the individual files that it has found. I’ve got quite a few cache files left over from various games, so I can just go ahead and hit the ‘Clean’ button to get rid of those automatically.

The second set of tools within CleanMyMac is designed to protect both your Mac and your privacy. Again, there’s a set of tiles that summarise the results for different tools, which include malware protection, temporary files left by Safari and other browsers, and aliases linked to recently opened apps and documents. CleanMyMac can scan your Mac for malware, but it’s worth stressing that it doesn’t provide the same protection as dedicated anti-virus apps such as BitDefender or Norton, so it’s worth considering alternatives if you really are worried about viruses on your Mac.

Performance is the main reason most of us decide to clean up our Macs, so this is a key set of tools. The three tiles here recommend a number of maintenance tasks that can help to keep things running smoothly. They also check for Login items that launch whenever your turn on your Mac, and items that may run in the background without you realizing. As you probably know, there is a similar option for showing Login and Background items in your Mac’s System Settings, but pressing the Review button in CleanMyMac may provide a little extra detail that may not show up in System Settings – such as the fact that I have about 14 different Adobe apps running in the background on my MacBook.

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You don’t need CleanMyMac to tell you when there’s an update available for the macOS, of course, but it can provide additional information about various apps that have updates available, or apps that you may have tried to remove in the recent past. There’s a tile that lists ‘App Leftovers’, which are files left behind when you delete the main application file itself (with my games library being a big offender here once more). There are also files that are sometimes left behind during the installation of new apps. CleanMyMac can also provide reminders about old applications that haven’t been used for a while, which you might be able to delete in order to free up some space.

We all have lots of old files that we no longer need stored on our Mac drives, but sometimes it can be hard to remember where they all are. CleanMyMac can scan individual folders that you specify in order to locate duplicate files, old downloads that you don’t need anymore, or particularly large files that are taking up a lot of space. It can detect duplicate photos too – although it will ask for permission to scan your Photos library before doing so. Again, the tiles in CleanMyMac give you a quick summary of the files that it’s found, and you can press ‘Review’ to browse through the various files in more detail before deleting them.

One feature of CleanMyMac that is sometimes overlooked is the pulldown menu that appears in your Mac’s main menu bar. This is available even when CleanMyMac itself isn’t running, so it’s a good way of quickly checking to see if there are any problems on your Mac. Again, there’s a series of tiles that provide quick summaries for details such as your laptop’s battery health and running temperature. It can show you the amount of memory and processor power being used by various apps, and lets you quickly shut down any apps that are hogging too much memory. It can even check the speed of your wi-fi network and tell you how much data you’ve downloaded recently.