Any one using clean my mac 2 on OS X Mawerick? Is it worth?

As I stated to RCR, never used any (besides running ClamXAV to see if there were any issues).

It, they, flying monkeys, whatever all refer to any AV software in general.

I ask because you never once say you've used it, and you quickly switch from "it" (one use) to "they" (used twice) inside a generic answer.

Yep, typing on an iPhone is a pain.

Barney-15E wrote:

Sure, it can give false positives, it can delete files that shouldn't be deleted, and can make parts of the system inaccessible.

Using the default settings (which Sophos strongly recommends) Sophos Home Edition will not delete anything without the user's permission, period.

In the default mode, only the "on access" scanner is active, & it only scans files after they are downloaded, before they are executed or made available to other executable files. In this respect, it is just like the AV software Apple builds into the OS.

The on access scanner does not scan already installed system files. You can do that if you run the "on demand" scanner, but only if you include the system level folders in that scan. If you want, you can do that after installing Sophos to catch anything malicious that might have been installed before the software was installed, but there is no reason to run the on demand scanner more than once if you let the on access scanner do its job.

As for false positives, like I said, I never saw any signs of that over all the years I used it. It did detect & quarantine several email attachments containing Windows malware sent to me by not-so-security-conscious friends & associates, but since I use the default settings they were not deleted & if I wanted to, I could have opened them to see what they contained.

Of course, like any other software files, components of Sophos can be corrupted by external events & it can be interfered with by other, incompatible software installed by the user. In particular, so-called system "enhancements" that don't follow Apple's developer guidelines can cause all kinds of problems. But I have never, ever seen any indication that Sophos itself causes any problems with well written software of any kind.

arthur wrote:

I understand the point about not wanting to transmit Windows viruses to my PC using friends, but most of the people I communicate with are Apple people anyway, and the PC people are smart enough to have their own antivirus software.

Many of the PC users I know are not using effective AV software. I know this because (as I said earlier) when I was running Sophos, from time to time I got email attachments from them containing Windows malware.

This was of no little concern to me because it meant that info about me & my family on their PC's was at risk. Particularly disturbing for me, one of them was a business associate with a lot of payroll & job site info on his PC for several dozen people.

Something to think about ....

Albyone wrote:

Just popped into Clean my mac 2 : Anyone using it? Is it worth installing it?

Thanks in advance for reply.

PS: fairly new user on Mac/Apple products! But love them...lol

No, definately something to avoid. Shoddy Marketing usually equals Shoddy Product and never more true in the case of CleanMyMac and MacKeeper.

Pete

But I have never, ever seen any indication that Sophos itself causes any problems with well written software of any kind.

But what Mac malware has it prevented from infecting your Mac?

Well, I was referring to the people I know, not the people you know.

But I have never, ever seen any indication that Sophos itself causes any problems with well written software of any kind.

I don't install anything but well written software (except Sophos).

And Sophos still ran away with my CPU and slowed my Macs down.

You seem unusually interested in defending Sophos- do you work for Sophos?

R C-R wrote:

I eventually uninstalled it about two months ago, but that was only because it adds harmless but somewhat verbose entries to the system log when it periodically runs its checks for new malware signatures in the background. That caused the logs to roll over faster than I wanted, but that's only because I sometimes refer to older ones when trying to help others identify issues doing that might clarify.

That has happened to me a couple of times and I don't think that's normal. I un-installed then re-installed Sophos and the number of entries was dramatically reduced.

OrnotBitwise wrote:

Try Onyx. It greatly simplifies the maintenance scripts we're all supposed to be running -- we all do run our scripts, don't we?

Never. Not only does the OS run those for me when needed, even if it did not I could go for several months without running any of them with no ill effects. In recent versions of OS X they only do some obscure cleanup of Unix files. Details available...somewhere.

MadMacs0 wrote:

That has happened to me a couple of times and I don't think that's normal. I un-installed then re-installed Sophos and the number of entries was dramatically reduced.

So now you don't get a line by line list of all the included malware signatures output to the log every time Sophos checks for updates to them? That was what I was seeing, & as I mentioned, the only reason I quit using it.

I looked for some setting that would change that, but aside from lengthening the interval between checks, which just makes that less frequent, I couldn't find anything that did.

If the computer isn't awake and running at 12:30 AM when it's scheduled, at least running this one periodically will keep the system log from getting overfull.

sudo newsyslog -F /var/log/system.log

arthur wrote:

Well, I was referring to the people I know, not the people you know.

These days, it isn't just the people you know that you have to worry about. It is also the people they know that they might have shared some info with.

For instance, I sometimes get emails from people I know also CC'ed to some people I don't know. That means that at the least, their email address is stored on my computer & mine is on theirs. From the content of the emails, it is often easy to figure out things about these people like where they live, their approximate income, if they have kids & about how old they are, the kind of events they are likely to attend, the social or political issues they are likely to respond to, maybe their names or the kind of car they drive, & much more.

If I can do that, so can hackers that gain access to their computers. And it isn't hard for them to spoof an email address so what seems like something coming from someone you know may in fact be coming from someone else, someone who now knows enough about you to convince you they are who they say they are.

Like I said, it is something to think about.

arthur wrote:

I don't install anything but well written software (except Sophos).

And Sophos still ran away with my CPU and slowed my Macs down.

You seem unusually interested in defending Sophos- do you work for Sophos?

No, I don't work for Sophos, or for that matter for any other software company.

It is just that I have run that software for years & never run into any problems using it. I've even tried to get it to misbehave every way I can think of, & to duplicate reports like yours of excessive CPU use. But I have never succeeded in getting it to do anything other than what it is supposed to do.

The closest I've ever come to getting it to "run away" with the CPU is to run an on demand scan of the entire startup drive with the option to decompress & examine all compressed files enabled. That does use a substantial amount of system resources, but that is unavoidable & expected, & never necessary if the on access scanner is enabled. Besides that, it runs as a low priority background task so it never interferes with any higher priority tasks.

So I have no idea why you saw slowdowns. Maybe your installation was corrupted somehow, or you had some other third party software installed that interfered with it. Or maybe you were running the on demand scanner like described above & not doing anything else, so there were no higher priority tasks running that needed more CPU time.

If you could tell me more about the details of how you ran it & what else was installed on your Mac, maybe I could see if I could duplicate your results. As it is, there isn't much to go on, so it is all guesswork.

WZZZ wrote:

If the computer isn't awake and running at 12:30 AM when it's scheduled, at least running this one periodically will keep the system log from getting overfull.

sudo newsyslog -F /var/log/system.log

The system log should never get overfull even if the computer isn't awake at 12:30 AM. In OS X, the logs no longer roll over via a cron job that won't run if the computer isn't awake at the scheduled time. Instead, a launch daemon handles that, & as a result any pending periodic jobs run shortly after the computer is awake. (See for instance page 12 of the Mavericks overview pdf for more about this.)

In fact, in Mavericks the daemon may not run on any easily discernible schedule. Maybe this is because of new Time Coalescing feature (page 8 of the same pdf), but that's just a guess.

Anyway, the bottom line is still that, as long as the OS is operating normally & there are no overt problems in evidence, there is no good reason to perform any sort of "maintenance," periodic or otherwise. Doing that is unlikely to do anything useful & it may well interfere with tasks the OS is already doing more efficiently than any human intervention could manage to do.

Well, I suppose that's at least one good thing to be said for Mav.