Best clean up utility for Mac OS X?

Someone in our household downloaded Mac Cleaner on our iMac.

I quickly deleted it using app zapper which finds and deletes child files as well as the main app.

However I am getting pop ups in Safari asking me to download mac keeper now. 😢

I must have missed something..

Any ideas of where to look to cleanse my machine of tyne Ebola of the cyber world!

Thanks!

bryrsmith wrote:

Link, you say not to download any of the "crap," but then say that OmniDiskSweeperis helpful.

I'm reasonably certain that Linc (note spelling) is no longer monitoring this year and a half old thread and you replied to the OP rather than he, so I'll take an educated guess at what he's trying to impart.

The "crap" he refers to is software that either modifies your OS, deletes files or changes preferences in accordance with it's view of how things should be instead of yours. OmniDiskSweeper is totally passive. All it does is give you information about your drive that you can then use to decide what to do about it. It won't make any modifications, leaving that up to your judgement on where to start freeing up additional space, if necessary.

Thanks for the info. I did find something that certainly seems worthwhile: Adware Medic, from thesafemac.com. It identified several adware programs on my machine and, with a click, removed them.

P.S. Note that judgment is spelled without an "e." 😉 As for replying to the original post, his comment, oddly, did not have a reply button directly under (as is now the case when I re-logged in.)

bryrsmith wrote:

Thanks for the info. I did find something that certainly seems worthwhile: Adware Medic, from thesafemac.com. It identified several adware programs on my machine and, with a click, removed them.

That app is written by a colleague of mine and I recommend it here quite frequently. Linc, on the other hand, will tell you that you don't have to download anything to remove adware and gives manual instructions for taking care of such issues. His philosophy is why download something recommended from an anonymous internet source when that's what got you in trouble in the first place. I understand his point, but having been involved in the development of AdwareMedic and it's predecessor the Adware Removal Tool, I have complete faith in what it does and have never run across any indication of it's harming anything.

Note that judgment is spelled without an "e."

Actually, both spellings are acceptable and depending on what dictionary you look in both are shown as preferred. Even Yosemite's spell check agrees with that.

bryrsmith wrote:

I did find something that certainly seems worthwhile: Adware Medic, from thesafemac.com. It identified several adware programs on my machine and, with a click, removed them.

Keep in mind, though, that AdwareMedic is not a "clean up utility" such as the programs being discussed in this topic. It doesn't purport to speed up your Mac, increase free disk space, etc. It has one job and one job only: removing adware. If you don't have any adware installed, it won't do you any good at all (though it shouldn't do you any harm either).

Just to weigh in – I actually found MacKeeper pretty useful when my old MacBook was running out of room. It generally scanned/cleared a GB or two with no issues every time I used it, and I haven't had any Adware issues.

However... BEWARE!

I also used its 'find duplicates' feature which again was handy, but I think I may have deleted ALL my photos from the last ten years ⚠ ⚠ ⚠

Need to have a proper look, am hoping it's just an issue with iPhoto not knowing where the actual files are... gulp.

chris_h_ wrote:

I may have deleted ALL my photos from the last ten years

Certainly possible. iPhoto always duplicates photos that are opened for editing, even if you don't make any changes to them, but the original is always retained in case you ever want to revert your edit. Since I've never used MacKeeper I don't know how it or you decided which was the duplicate, but it likely corrupted the index so that even if one copy of each photo is still around, it's lost to iPhoto now. The same thing can happen with music libraries and e-mail that isn't managed by iTunes and your e-mail client. Apple maintains a database for each file and when the file goes missing without being removed from the database, things go South in a hurry. You've now stumbled across one of the main reasons I recommend to all users that they never use any type of Cleaner app. I did it once when Monolingual first came out and it took three weeks to replace all the apps it disabled.

chris_h_ wrote:

I actually found MacKeeper pretty useful when my old MacBook was running out of room. It generally scanned/cleared a GB or two with no issues every time I used it

Just to point out, the files that MacKeeper was "cleaning" were not junk files... which is why they kept coming back and it kept removing them. Using an app like MacKeeper to "clean" your hard drive is never an appropriate solution when your hard drive is filling up. It just made the problems worse, prompting you to keep running it, which of course made you feel that it was doing something. The real solution was for you to manually remove some of your files or apps to clear some space, or to upgrade the hard drive if you couldn't do that.

Sorry to hear about the loss of your photos... hope they're backed up. This isn't particularly unique to MacKeeper, though... any of these "cleaning" utilities have frequently been known to delete things they shouldn't have.

Using anti-virus software really doesn't give you much benefit, and is likely to cause you a lot of problems in return. Avast in particular is probably the worst choice you could make, and although Sophos used to be good, it has been implicated in causing some issues lately. If you must install anti-virus software for some reason, the only thing I would currently recommend is ClamXav.

For more information, see my Mac Malware Guide.

(Fair disclosure: I may receive compensation from links to my sites, TheSafeMac.com and AdwareMedic.com.)

Yes, well, there's a lot of bad advice out there. Many of the major Mac publications will post recommendations for various "cleaning" utilities, because those companies throw them advertising dollars. In the case of CNET, you really can't trust anything they say*, since their own download.cnet.com site is actively injecting adware into some of the software downloads available there.

(* One exception to the rule: Topher Kessler wrote for MacFixIt, which got bought by CNET. He then continued writing under CNET's management for a while, so many of his articles can be found on CNET. They are good despite the fact that they are on a CNET site now.)

To add to Thomas' notes. I have subscribed to Macworld and Mac|Life (formerly Mac Addict) magazines for years. Only twice that I can recall did they ever cover a utility like these in a review. It was MacKeeper in its very early days, and the gave it a so-so review. The other was for CleanMyiPad, which was roundly criticized by one mag or the other for its complete uselessness. Since then, I haven't seen either mention any cleaning or other such app in years. It could be taken that by omission they don't endorse any of them.

It's not that they won't review any utilities, but they both stick to the much more trusted ones that actually do something useful. Like C|NET, they also of course have ads for some of these companies (gotta' pay them bills with ad revenue), but I also haven't seen any ads for MacKeeper or MacPaw (CleanMyMac) in quite some time. They used to advertise MacKeeper a lot, but as it become apparent how useless and destructive these apps can be, they must have stopped accepting advertising space from them.

Antonio_Fr wrote:

Then rather than saying it's useless, please provide a valuable answer ...

Not sure why you are picking on one person as there are probably a dozen others here who have said basically the same thing, some more verbose than others.

And without knowing exactly what you are looking to accomplish, it's impossible to make specific recommendations. There is no "Cleaner" app for the Mac that is worth paying for, but for some specific issues there is plenty of freeware and even good advise for manually taking care of them. Since this is a very old thread and probably very few of us still monitoring it, unless you find information here that is helpful, you would be much better off starting a new discussion with a detailed statement of what your issues are or what you are trying to accomplish.

Antonio_Fr wrote:

Hi,

Then rather than saying it's useless, please provide a valuable answer ...

Regards

As this is your only comment on a two year old thread then perhaps you would rather share what technical issues you have in your own thread.

Thank you

Pete

Hi Pete,

Sorry, perhaps my answer was a little bit direct. :-)

I was reading the first posts, and one(and more) answer was of the type "nope useless..." .

I personally would have answer the same, but with at least one or two recommendations like (CCleaner, CleanMyMac, ...).

The idea of my reaction was :" could you please complete your answer ..." ;-)

Regards,

Antonio

So you see recommending scamware such as Cleaner and CleanMyMac as better.

I disagree vehemently with that appraisal for both of those are only good for causing problems with Mac and do nothing at all that is worthwhile.