**Space Lens: A Powerful Tool for Visualizing and Managing Storage on Your Mac**

When it comes to managing storage on your Mac, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of files, folders, and apps that are taking up space. That's where Space Lens comes in – a handy visualization tool that gives you a quick and easy way to see exactly what's taking up space on your Mac. With Space Lens, you can see at a glance how your files are being stored and identify areas where you can make some space. Whether you're running low on storage or simply want to clean out old files and folders, Space Lens is the perfect tool for the job.

**Visualizing Your Storage**

Space Lens provides a clear and concise view of exactly what's taking up space on your Mac. It uses a simple interface that shows you how much space each file type, folder, and app is using, along with an estimate of how much free space you have left. This makes it easy to see at a glance where you can make some space and identify areas where you can cut back. For example, if you notice that your Movies folder is taking up more space than you thought, you can quickly delete the files you no longer need. Alternatively, if you're running low on storage and don't know what's taking up all the space, Space Lens gives you a clear overview of exactly where the problem lies.

**Large and Old Files**

One of the most useful features of Space Lens is its ability to highlight large and old files that are taking up more space than they need to. This can be particularly useful if you've got files that have been sitting on your Mac for years, but haven't been updated or used in a long time. By identifying these files, you can quickly delete them and free up some much-needed space. For example, if you find that Final Cut Pro is taking up too much space, you can use Space Lens to identify the specific project files that are causing the problem and delete them. This makes it easy to get rid of old projects and files that you no longer need.

**Shredder: Erasing Files for Good**

Another essential tool in Space Lens is Shredder – a feature that allows you to remove files from your Mac once and for all. When you move a file to the Trash, it may seem like it's been deleted, but in reality, the file is still stored on your Mac until you empty the Trash. That's where Shredder comes in – an app that can erase files completely, removing them from your system forever. This makes it easy to get rid of sensitive documents or other files that you no longer need, and ensures that they're truly gone for good.

**Conclusion**

Space Lens is a powerful tool for managing storage on your Mac, and we highly recommend it to anyone who wants to keep their device running at its best. With its clear and concise interface, Space Lens makes it easy to see exactly what's taking up space on your Mac, and identify areas where you can make some space. Whether you're running low on storage or simply want to clean out old files and folders, Space Lens is the perfect tool for the job. And with Shredder, you can be sure that any files you delete are truly gone for good.

**Clean My Mac X: A Useful Tool for Managing Storage**

Space Lens is part of a suite of tools offered by Clean My Mac X – a popular utility app that helps users manage their storage and keep their Mac running at its best. For just $34.95 per year, you can get access to a range of useful tools and features, including Space Lens. Whether you're looking to free up some space or simply want to keep your Mac clean and organized, Clean My Mac X is the perfect tool for the job.

**Support for Multiple Apps and Macs**

One of the best things about Clean My Mac X is its ability to support multiple apps and Macs. If you have multiple devices, you can get a single subscription that covers them all – making it easy to manage your storage across all your devices. This makes Clean My Mac X an even more valuable tool for anyone who wants to keep their entire ecosystem of devices running at its best.

**Conclusion**

Space Lens is a powerful tool for managing storage on your Mac, and we highly recommend it to anyone who wants to keep their device running at its best. Whether you're looking to free up some space or simply want to clean out old files and folders, Space Lens is the perfect tool for the job. And with Clean My Mac X, you can get access to a range of useful tools and features that make it easy to manage your storage across all your devices.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwe would love it if everybody became a member of club twit at twit tv club twit so on occasion we release free episodes of hands on mac to show you exactly what you'll get if you join the club thanks for listening and uh we can't wait to see you in the club coming up on hands on mack i micah sargent am going to sit down well i guess i already am sitting down but we're going to sit down and have a serious talk about one of my favorite apps for the mac stay tuned this welcome back to hands on mac the show where we talk all things apple devices yes this is the show where i walk you through some of the best tips and tricks for your apple devices whether they be the mac your iphone your ipad your apple watch i love to talk about it all right here on hands on mac and today we are talking about one of my favorite apps for the mac but it's a bit of a controversy because depending on who you talk to they would maybe say that this is an app you don't need and look you don't need this app but this app is fantastic and it can be very helpful for you it's called clean my mac x and yes it is pronounced x as opposed to 10. clean my mac x is a multi-purpose utility for your mac that can help you make sure that your mac is clean and tidy and ready to rock to the best of its ability but because of the long history of apps that provide these sort of cleaning utilities uh these sort of sprucing up utilities these speed up utilities that don't actually work then clean my mac x has uh unfortunately and unfairly fallen into that category uh from the views of some folks and here's the important thing that i i want to talk about it's that i would argue there's a bit of an elitism involved in the uh suggestion that this is an app that people shouldn't use because uh some would argue that this tool that does so many things are all things that you could do on your own on your mac without the use of this tool and that certainly is true many of the the tools and utilities that are built into cleanbymacx are tools and utilities that you could create yourself or use yourself using terminal on your mac or any number of other options and while that is the case that doesn't mean that we shouldn't provide a tool that can do all of these things much easier and much quicker without needing to involve more work from the end user so while there are a lot of scam apps out there that say that they'll speed up your mac or they will clean up your mac and save so much storage that don't actually do those things or do them poorly clean my mac x is not one of those and it is why i'm talking to you about it today and why i want to show you all of the magical things it can do and why i choose to use this application despite the fact that i am a power user on the mac and could do many of these things on their own so let's hop on over to the mac and take a look at clean my mac x so you will see this is the front screen for clean my mac x when you launch it the first time there will be some different setup options including uh using the assistant that's built in uh and doing some kind of ongoing scanning so you're free to set that up exactly how you want but it starts with this screen the smart scan screen and what it says here is start with a nice and thorough scan of your mac i will choose scan and what the mac is going to do or what the application rather is going to do is look through all of the apps and files on my mac and then also do a quick scan to determine if there's any sort of potential uh virus or adware or other issue that might be on my mac before it rounds things out with a way to speed up the system so it is still going through the protection right now and now it is completed it's actually very fast uh it has shown that there are 5.92 gigabytes of data that can probably be removed uh that there were no threats found and that there are some tasks that can be done to speed up the system so we're going to tap run and it says hey we need to quit this app uh in order to be able to go through the process so i am going to just choose quit all and that will close out of all of them and then you can see here it's saying hey look uh in order to do this process we actually need to install a helper in your system what this means is on its own clean my mac x doesn't have the permissions that it needs to do the full cleanup that it's trying to do so i will type in my password and install the helper and now it is able to go through and do this removal so it is kind of quickly zooming through to remove stuff that it doesn't need and i'm going to show you in a moment what all it is looking for as it does this scan so we'll let it complete the process and then talk about it so the process is completed and you can see that it pops open the password app that i quit while i was doing that and then it shows me at the end there were three tasks that it did to make sure that the mac was running as quickly as possible it removed 5.92 gigs of junk that we didn't need and it did a deep scan or rather it did a normal skin but it offers the ability to do a deep scan i don't need to do a deep scan just yet but i am going to choose view log down at the bottom now this shows that it looked in my trash bins there are different trash bins on the mac including the one that's shown but also some hidden ones removed stuff from there mail attachments that were taking up space that you didn't need anymore system junk this can include quite a few things the maintenance scripts the dns cache and ram to flush that so now we're going to go back to start over and just scan one more time as it kind of looks through and you can see it says that there are 16.7 megabytes of unneeded junk that can be removed so we're going to take a look at this by choosing review details and this gives you an idea of what uh cleanmymac can possibly remove including system cache files so these are some system caches that are being stored this is just different parts of your system your operating system mac os that saves information so that it doesn't have to reload it every time user cache files so when you're logged in some of the stuff that it'll save for later and system log files and then of course mail attachments so we'll go back to the summary we don't need to do another clean right now and then i'll choose start over let's go down from here so smart scan is going to do kind of a bunch of tasks all at once system junk gives you an idea of the stuff on your mac that may be taking up space so not only does it optimize your system by removing system cache files but it can also help with some errors if you've got some files that are maybe corrupted as it looks through different parts of the system here we'll we'll take a closer look at what it is removing so here it didn't find really anything user cache files and system cache files but one of the really cool features that cleanmymac has is it is aware of the fact that this machine that i'm using is an m2 macbook air and apple also has the intel mac and macbook and lots of different intel devices and when an app developer creates an app they if they want to support apple's uh silicon m1 m2 then they need to release an app that has both the intel version and the apple silicon version and cleanmymac says hey look i know you're using an m2 machine you know you're using an intel machine or excuse me an m2 machine not an intel machine so you don't need to have that intel version of the app that's just taking up space it doesn't need to be there so it goes ahead and helps you remove that yourself and if you choose review details you can see how it shows other stuff that's here xcode junk so this is stuff that i've downloaded through xcode which is apple's developer platform unused disk images so if you download different applications from the internet or different files from the internet that are saved as dmg those are disk image files then you can remove those very easily by coming into here and seeing what the big ones are and see if you want to keep them or get rid of them depending on where they're installed universal binaries these were the apps i was talking about so right now it's left those because a lot of people are kind of like i don't know if i should remove them it's okay to take those away this would remove the intel version so that it's just the apple silicon version so i could easily clear up 1.76 gigs on my mac just by removing those universal binaries there are also versions of documents that you may have old updates deleted users downloads broken login items broken preferences user log files and language files that's another huge space waster if you speak english or you speak japanese or you speak spanish then you don't necessarily need all of those other language files that many apps are going to include in those app bundles so why not kick those to the curb because you don't need those language files you're just speaking and reading in that one language so clean my mac will take those files away because they're just taking up unnecessary space i'm going to leave all of this alone because my xcode junk or is actually stuff that i want to keep so that the next time xcode launches it doesn't have to recache uh i can choose mail attachments i don't use the mail app so there aren't um a lot of there's not a lot of scanning to do there because i use a third-party mail app but then also trash bins if any of the trash bins across my mac had something in them then this can scan and say hey let's remove that now we get into even more powerful stuff first is malware removal yes clean my mac x has a built-in malware removal tool i'm not going to choose scan right now because it would take a long time but this will go through and help you remove malicious files and make sure that your system is free of those vulnerabilities a very nice tool to use and you can actually set it up to keep working throughout the day and keep an eye on your system if you'd like and then privacy under privacy you have the ability to clean up the different applications that you use in terms of your browsing data so if you want to completely wipe away your browsing data in firefox or in safari then you are able to use this to do so if there are wi-fi networks you no longer want your mac to save you can remove them here and what i love is that they've recently added the ability to even make adjustments to your application permissions so think about all of the applications on your mac that you've said yes you can view my um you can view my location you can view my photos you can view this all of that stuff that you've given permission over to here is a great way to say i don't want you to have that permission i don't want you to have that permission you need to rethink that permission and quickly go through and make those changes so i do love that right there you've got another way to make sure that your privacy is maintained next i love these two under speed are optimization and maintenance optimization is one of my favorite features because it helps you keep apps that peskily launch even though you don't want them to when you first start your computer from being able to launch because there are two types of start at launch methods one is called a login item and the other is called a launch agent a login item is something that in many cases you set up yourself by going into your system preferences on your mac and going to users and then choosing what you want to have start when you start your mac so i for example may have slack startup is when i launch my mac and i may want it to connect to my network attached storage when i start my mac those are login items but launch agents are kind of hidden uh versions of those login items it says when mac when mac os launches then go ahead and start these different applications and sometimes there's sort of little system helper tools that run in the background so that whenever you launch the app it's ready to go but those can be hard to track down and turn off uh i've had some apps in the past spotify for example where i had said do not launch it log in do not launch it login do not launch it log in and it was still doing it well it turned out that's because it was a launch agent that was causing the issue so login items i could easily select either of these and remove them or i can just click over here to disable them but keep those login items i want to keep those enabled but launch agents here so you can see that set app which is uh an application for multiple apps that you can use on your mac via a subscription has some different helper tools and launcher tools the launcher is disabled because i don't have that work at login it is a little menu bar feature but the set app updater is enabled dropbox has an updater that's separate from the actual dropbox app that's enabled and then there's the one for cleanmymac so i could easily disable these if i didn't want them they're fine i'm okay with them i keep those there then if you had an application that was stalling on your mac you could use hung applications to be able to quit or kill one of those apps rather than using activity monitor to do so and heavy consumers this is if you've got an app that is just taking up a bunch of space rather not space but performance on your mac this is great for that it makes sure that that information is not taking up uh that that app is able to be quit or closed and at least you have a little bit more information about what might be taking up so much of the ram or the processing power on your mac maintenance is another great one uh we'll choose view all eight tasks to show you some of the things that it can do first this one is probably the most unclear of the utilities that clean my mac x has uh it's called free up ram and what it does is it kind of temporarily takes up as much ram on your system random access memory as it possibly can to shove out everything else and that kind of helps the mac refresh and go okay we're good we can only take up as much as this app or this app or this app needs uh this is i've actually never used this feature because i never have had an issue where i felt like it was a ram problem but sometimes when you're using a 3d modeling application or photoshop and high high high detail you may run into some ram issues and this could be helpful for that freeing up purgable space uh as you can see when i click on this it says says you can purge up to 87.74 gigs from your disk that means that those 87.74 gigs are space that doesn't need to be taken up on my mac but is right now it's important to understand that this data that's being uh saved in this sort of purgable space is data that the system will use when it's available but it is marked at such a low priority that if you suddenly start to download more stuff to your mac or bring stuff into your mac from a hard disk drive or a flash drive that stuff would get kicked out by the system anyway so this is often just some kind of cache files and different information that sits in the background that isn't necessarily needed so i don't need to remove 87.74 gigs from my disk i've got plenty of spaces it is if i did though or if you have a smaller map a smaller mac storage space this is a great way to to free that space up as it also notes though this is a feature that can be kind of time consuming so you will have to wait for it to finish running maintenance scripts this is something that i is also not incredibly clear they don't go into a great detail on what the maintenance scripts do but they are essentially little trimming and adjusting scripts that will help to clear out cruft uh because that's what happens as you continue to use your system little bits of dust collect all over everything little bits of cruft uh gather in the corners and these little maintenance scripts can help kind of reset things clean things up so i typically do uh run this and as you can see uh clean my mac says this task includes a complex of scripts that rotate system logs remove temporary items and run a number of useful system optimizations uh these are daily weekly and monthly periodic scripts uh they're great to be used all at once to keep your mac os in shape and so yes i every time i open clean my mac x i go ahead and run a maintenance script uh request to clean the system up and it will also work as part of the smart scan flushing the dns cache this is a great way to kind of speed up the system if you have an issue while you're trying to uh visit the internet so if you're on the internet and you're browsing and things are running slow or they don't seem to be running correctly and you're going through the troubleshooting steps your wi-fi seems to be working okay your ethernet's great nothing's wrong there you've restart whatever try flushing the dns cache that can be helpful as well uh this is one of those systems that's a little bit in-depth if you want to understand more about how it works so we won't go into too much about flushing the dns cache but it definitely helps to speed things up and can be a great step in your troubleshooting chain if you're having issues speed up mail if i use the mail app for uh the mac instead of my own third-party mail app this would help do so by kind of once again cleaning out the cache re-indexing spotlight this is a feature that i recommend you be very careful about using because it is a ver if this is a feature that takes a long time basically as you use your mac if you use spotlight to search for things on your mac as i do i pretty much do everything from spotlight which is that little search bar that appears if you hold down command and press the space bar or if you click on the little magnifying glass in the menu bar to find a file on a mac or launch an application on a mac or visit a web page or do a quick search or do some conversions spotlight's very powerful that's why it's how i navigate my mac but over time your mac is supposed to keep track of the files folders applications etc that you have on your mac by what's called indexing with spotlight so what it does is it searches through your whole system and kind of keeps a low level list of everything that's on your mac so that way it doesn't have to kind of restart a search every time you type into spotlight instead it kind of gets to pull from that list that it has that is the spotlight index every once in a while though if you make big changes to your mac or suddenly you uh dump a whole bunch of files onto it from somewhere else you may need to re-index spotlight get that restarted uh and in the past i've had issues where it stopped showing some of the apps that i had and i couldn't figure out why and there was just something wrong with my spotlight index so re-indexing spotlight was what fixed it the last two repairing disk permissions and doing time machine snapshot thinning are great ways to kind of help with your system as well repairing disk permissions this is a very specific uh feature that will help to make sure that either your internal disk or an external disk that you have connected to your mac has the right permission set up so that you are able to access all the files on it again this is one of those troubleshooting steps that you kind of use as part of a chain if you're having trouble getting to the files on an external drive and you should have permission to access those files you shouldn't have an issue pulling and copying or pasting from from that drive repairing disk permissions can help with that as far as time machine snapshot thinning time machine is the built-in backup tool for the for mac os and it will automatically create snapshots of your system that just kind of help you to restore your system to an earlier date but those snapshots can kind of build up over time and get a little heavy and uh fill in and so with time machine snapshot thinning clean my mac x goes through and says okay we don't need all of this data because it's already stored as the the larger time machine backup so these snapshots can kind of be thinned out a little bit and uh cleaned out if they're if they're a little bit older then we've got one of the main reasons that i use clean my mac x this is easily my favorite feature of clean my mac x it is the uninstaller cleanmymac x will keep a list of all of the applications that are installed on your mac and will keep track of how often you use them it will also keep track of you uninstalling and installing apps so for example there is an application called mock-ups studio on my mac that i have not used on this device in a very long time so clean my mac says hey you may want to just get rid of this you're not really using it why do you need to keep it around and i can easily go in and say okay yeah actually that's a good idea i am going to remove it i'm not though because i do use it i just haven't used it on the this macbook air but then i can go back again to all applications i can sort them not just by name but also by their size to find the huge apps and when this is the most important thing when i uninstall an app using the uninstaller built in to clean my mac x typically the way that you uninstall an app on the mac is by going into the applications folder and dragging and dropping or right clicking and deleting the or using the keyboard to delete the application and that application and everything inside gets thrown away but many an app is going to install other little things all over your system into the cache into the launch agent uh folder into the library all sorts of places that it exists and that stuff can build up over time using this uninstaller cleanmymac x looks at the app looks at the code to see what all it says to install whenever it first launches the program and it goes and grabs all those little pieces as well that it installed all over your system and removes them when you do the uninstall that is what makes this feature so amazing and why even if cleanmymac x only had this feature i would still pay for it because it's so great to be able to do those uninstalls i love too that it sorts between where you've gotten the different apps whether they came from the app store or set app which i'll talk about in a moment or from some other place the vendors that have created these apps very handy to know all of that there's also a built-in updater it can be kind of annoying to keep track of different apps and the updates that they have some of those apps that you got from the app store a little easier to download the updates for those but if you got those apps from third parties then you often have to launch the app in the first place and in some cases even need to go in and choose check for updates clean my mac x can keep again a list of the apps that you have installed and regularly check the system to see if there's an update available and then give you an easy way to update that app and install the latest version right here in the application so again another great reason to have it to make sure that your apps are always up to date always have the latest features and i love too that it even if the app supports it we'll pull in the information of what is in that update so handy and then extensions uh these are different extensions that you may have installed on your mac or that have been installed on your mac through the use of different applications so uh one example of this is that for spotlight the search feature there is a plug-in called ibooks author importer and it's a special tool to use with the ibooks author platform uh that works with spotlight but then safari extensions you can see there's a little eye and information icon for these because each of these has to be removed using safari so they let you know unfortunately you can't remove this using clean my mac x but here is where you can go to do that and then preference panes uh one example of this is if you have a i use a backblaze um backblaze as a way to back up my system and backblaze has a preference pane icon so that you can click you can open system preferences click on backblaze and make adjustments there because backblaze itself doesn't really need to have its own app there's not a lot going on there it just goes ahead and lets you do it as if it's part of your system itself so you could check to see those preference panes remove them if you don't want them or be able to access those and then last but not least our internet plugins as you can see i don't have any of those so there's no need to remove those but if you did again easy to make adjustments to those as well i also forgot to mention in the uninstaller there's also the ability instead of uninstalling the application you can actually choose to reset the application so what that does is over maybe you you have an app that you've been using over time and then suddenly it starts giving you trouble and you think oh i'm going to have to delete this app and install it again in order to get it working you can use cleanmymac to basically restore it back to factory settings from the original version of the app and the reason why there uh when i clicked on xsnapper i think it's pronounced snap snapper um it doesn't have the reset option is because i have not launched it on this mac before so there's nothing to reset but had i launched the app then that ability to reset would be there it's a very great it's a very uh easy way to do that troubleshooting of making sure that it is up to date the last options here are called file adjustments there's the space lens what this does is it scans your whole system and then it provides kind of a graph showing you the different file types and different places on your mac where there's a lot of storage being used so it just gives you a visualization of how the storage on your mac has been taken up by the different files folders apps and everything else that's there on your mac so you can just get a quick and handy way to go oh i should remove these movies from my mac because i don't need them anymore because i'm not watching them right now or i could clean out this archive because and put it on my network attached storage instead of keeping it locally on my mac this is what space lens is for just a nice visualization of how your files are being stored and then also gives you the ability to remove files that are maybe huge that you didn't even know were there on your mac so if you start to run out of space space lens can help you out with that large and old files is just a more specific look at those uh files and folders that either you aren't using those are the old ones the ones that have been around forever but have not been updated or have not been modified that's a way to get to those and then large files uh the biggest files that take up the most space on your mac i've used this in the past and like oh right i forgot i had all of that junk in final cut pro all this video that i'm not going to go into those projects and edit those again so let me kick them over to the network attached storage and get rid of them this was a great way to find that and then last but not least is shredder i think this should be an icon of a rat and if you've watched teenage mutant ninja turtles then you'll know what i'm talking about anyway um wait no was he shredder no shredder was the bad guy what was the rat's name anyway back to the back to the show uh shredder lets you remove files and know that they have been truly deleted and removed so when you move something to your trash and you empty the trash it goes away from your site but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's not stored somewhere in your operating system and that that space is just waiting to be taken up at which point then it will be kind of flushed away this will erase a file with all certainty making the file or folder be gone there's no trace of that file or folder anymore so if there's something that you have that you want to get rid of on your mac and want to make sure that it's truly gone that's what shredder can do so that is clean my mac x a very powerful tool for helping you clean up your mac and keep it clean and it along with a few other apps from macpaul is one of the first apps i download when i set up a new mac because i know that there are a lot of files on my mac that i just really don't need they're just sitting in the background taking up a bunch of space so it's very handy to be able to go into my mac and take a look at uh the the system and see what in the world is is taking up so much space on my mac and why a developer may have added all of this extra stuff because in many cases it's just making sure that that app can be supported across the entire system and an ecosystem rather of macs that are out there be the intel or apple silicon you can purchase clean my mac x uh 34.95 for a one year subscription to clean my mac x if you just uh have the one mac they also have a a plan that can give you support for multiple app multiple macs but it is uh easy to check out clean my mac x with that subscription 34.95 a year uh very easy if you if you do want to cancel your subscription but uh i think well worth the price for this app that i use at least once a week to keep my mac clean and this is one that again as i said is uh unfairly sometimes categorized in those sort of scam apps that don't actually do anything for your system but there are powerful tools in cleanmymac x and it is made by a reputable company mac paul that does a great job of creating tools and utilities for your mac to have it running at its best and that's the whole point of this show is making sure you're making the most of those devices so thank you for tuning in to yet another episode of hands on mac i hope you enjoyed today's episode i'd love to hear uh feedback from you if there was uh if you have thoughts on cleanmymac x or other utilities and of course you can reach out to me micah tv m-i-k-a-h at twit.tv this show publishes every thursday to those of you out there who are subscribers either through apple podcasts or via club twit i thank you all for your support for helping make the show a possibility and i will see you next week for another episode of hands on mac goodbye youwe would love it if everybody became a member of club twit at twit tv club twit so on occasion we release free episodes of hands on mac to show you exactly what you'll get if you join the club thanks for listening and uh we can't wait to see you in the club coming up on hands on mack i micah sargent am going to sit down well i guess i already am sitting down but we're going to sit down and have a serious talk about one of my favorite apps for the mac stay tuned this welcome back to hands on mac the show where we talk all things apple devices yes this is the show where i walk you through some of the best tips and tricks for your apple devices whether they be the mac your iphone your ipad your apple watch i love to talk about it all right here on hands on mac and today we are talking about one of my favorite apps for the mac but it's a bit of a controversy because depending on who you talk to they would maybe say that this is an app you don't need and look you don't need this app but this app is fantastic and it can be very helpful for you it's called clean my mac x and yes it is pronounced x as opposed to 10. clean my mac x is a multi-purpose utility for your mac that can help you make sure that your mac is clean and tidy and ready to rock to the best of its ability but because of the long history of apps that provide these sort of cleaning utilities uh these sort of sprucing up utilities these speed up utilities that don't actually work then clean my mac x has uh unfortunately and unfairly fallen into that category uh from the views of some folks and here's the important thing that i i want to talk about it's that i would argue there's a bit of an elitism involved in the uh suggestion that this is an app that people shouldn't use because uh some would argue that this tool that does so many things are all things that you could do on your own on your mac without the use of this tool and that certainly is true many of the the tools and utilities that are built into cleanbymacx are tools and utilities that you could create yourself or use yourself using terminal on your mac or any number of other options and while that is the case that doesn't mean that we shouldn't provide a tool that can do all of these things much easier and much quicker without needing to involve more work from the end user so while there are a lot of scam apps out there that say that they'll speed up your mac or they will clean up your mac and save so much storage that don't actually do those things or do them poorly clean my mac x is not one of those and it is why i'm talking to you about it today and why i want to show you all of the magical things it can do and why i choose to use this application despite the fact that i am a power user on the mac and could do many of these things on their own so let's hop on over to the mac and take a look at clean my mac x so you will see this is the front screen for clean my mac x when you launch it the first time there will be some different setup options including uh using the assistant that's built in uh and doing some kind of ongoing scanning so you're free to set that up exactly how you want but it starts with this screen the smart scan screen and what it says here is start with a nice and thorough scan of your mac i will choose scan and what the mac is going to do or what the application rather is going to do is look through all of the apps and files on my mac and then also do a quick scan to determine if there's any sort of potential uh virus or adware or other issue that might be on my mac before it rounds things out with a way to speed up the system so it is still going through the protection right now and now it is completed it's actually very fast uh it has shown that there are 5.92 gigabytes of data that can probably be removed uh that there were no threats found and that there are some tasks that can be done to speed up the system so we're going to tap run and it says hey we need to quit this app uh in order to be able to go through the process so i am going to just choose quit all and that will close out of all of them and then you can see here it's saying hey look uh in order to do this process we actually need to install a helper in your system what this means is on its own clean my mac x doesn't have the permissions that it needs to do the full cleanup that it's trying to do so i will type in my password and install the helper and now it is able to go through and do this removal so it is kind of quickly zooming through to remove stuff that it doesn't need and i'm going to show you in a moment what all it is looking for as it does this scan so we'll let it complete the process and then talk about it so the process is completed and you can see that it pops open the password app that i quit while i was doing that and then it shows me at the end there were three tasks that it did to make sure that the mac was running as quickly as possible it removed 5.92 gigs of junk that we didn't need and it did a deep scan or rather it did a normal skin but it offers the ability to do a deep scan i don't need to do a deep scan just yet but i am going to choose view log down at the bottom now this shows that it looked in my trash bins there are different trash bins on the mac including the one that's shown but also some hidden ones removed stuff from there mail attachments that were taking up space that you didn't need anymore system junk this can include quite a few things the maintenance scripts the dns cache and ram to flush that so now we're going to go back to start over and just scan one more time as it kind of looks through and you can see it says that there are 16.7 megabytes of unneeded junk that can be removed so we're going to take a look at this by choosing review details and this gives you an idea of what uh cleanmymac can possibly remove including system cache files so these are some system caches that are being stored this is just different parts of your system your operating system mac os that saves information so that it doesn't have to reload it every time user cache files so when you're logged in some of the stuff that it'll save for later and system log files and then of course mail attachments so we'll go back to the summary we don't need to do another clean right now and then i'll choose start over let's go down from here so smart scan is going to do kind of a bunch of tasks all at once system junk gives you an idea of the stuff on your mac that may be taking up space so not only does it optimize your system by removing system cache files but it can also help with some errors if you've got some files that are maybe corrupted as it looks through different parts of the system here we'll we'll take a closer look at what it is removing so here it didn't find really anything user cache files and system cache files but one of the really cool features that cleanmymac has is it is aware of the fact that this machine that i'm using is an m2 macbook air and apple also has the intel mac and macbook and lots of different intel devices and when an app developer creates an app they if they want to support apple's uh silicon m1 m2 then they need to release an app that has both the intel version and the apple silicon version and cleanmymac says hey look i know you're using an m2 machine you know you're using an intel machine or excuse me an m2 machine not an intel machine so you don't need to have that intel version of the app that's just taking up space it doesn't need to be there so it goes ahead and helps you remove that yourself and if you choose review details you can see how it shows other stuff that's here xcode junk so this is stuff that i've downloaded through xcode which is apple's developer platform unused disk images so if you download different applications from the internet or different files from the internet that are saved as dmg those are disk image files then you can remove those very easily by coming into here and seeing what the big ones are and see if you want to keep them or get rid of them depending on where they're installed universal binaries these were the apps i was talking about so right now it's left those because a lot of people are kind of like i don't know if i should remove them it's okay to take those away this would remove the intel version so that it's just the apple silicon version so i could easily clear up 1.76 gigs on my mac just by removing those universal binaries there are also versions of documents that you may have old updates deleted users downloads broken login items broken preferences user log files and language files that's another huge space waster if you speak english or you speak japanese or you speak spanish then you don't necessarily need all of those other language files that many apps are going to include in those app bundles so why not kick those to the curb because you don't need those language files you're just speaking and reading in that one language so clean my mac will take those files away because they're just taking up unnecessary space i'm going to leave all of this alone because my xcode junk or is actually stuff that i want to keep so that the next time xcode launches it doesn't have to recache uh i can choose mail attachments i don't use the mail app so there aren't um a lot of there's not a lot of scanning to do there because i use a third-party mail app but then also trash bins if any of the trash bins across my mac had something in them then this can scan and say hey let's remove that now we get into even more powerful stuff first is malware removal yes clean my mac x has a built-in malware removal tool i'm not going to choose scan right now because it would take a long time but this will go through and help you remove malicious files and make sure that your system is free of those vulnerabilities a very nice tool to use and you can actually set it up to keep working throughout the day and keep an eye on your system if you'd like and then privacy under privacy you have the ability to clean up the different applications that you use in terms of your browsing data so if you want to completely wipe away your browsing data in firefox or in safari then you are able to use this to do so if there are wi-fi networks you no longer want your mac to save you can remove them here and what i love is that they've recently added the ability to even make adjustments to your application permissions so think about all of the applications on your mac that you've said yes you can view my um you can view my location you can view my photos you can view this all of that stuff that you've given permission over to here is a great way to say i don't want you to have that permission i don't want you to have that permission you need to rethink that permission and quickly go through and make those changes so i do love that right there you've got another way to make sure that your privacy is maintained next i love these two under speed are optimization and maintenance optimization is one of my favorite features because it helps you keep apps that peskily launch even though you don't want them to when you first start your computer from being able to launch because there are two types of start at launch methods one is called a login item and the other is called a launch agent a login item is something that in many cases you set up yourself by going into your system preferences on your mac and going to users and then choosing what you want to have start when you start your mac so i for example may have slack startup is when i launch my mac and i may want it to connect to my network attached storage when i start my mac those are login items but launch agents are kind of hidden uh versions of those login items it says when mac when mac os launches then go ahead and start these different applications and sometimes there's sort of little system helper tools that run in the background so that whenever you launch the app it's ready to go but those can be hard to track down and turn off uh i've had some apps in the past spotify for example where i had said do not launch it log in do not launch it login do not launch it log in and it was still doing it well it turned out that's because it was a launch agent that was causing the issue so login items i could easily select either of these and remove them or i can just click over here to disable them but keep those login items i want to keep those enabled but launch agents here so you can see that set app which is uh an application for multiple apps that you can use on your mac via a subscription has some different helper tools and launcher tools the launcher is disabled because i don't have that work at login it is a little menu bar feature but the set app updater is enabled dropbox has an updater that's separate from the actual dropbox app that's enabled and then there's the one for cleanmymac so i could easily disable these if i didn't want them they're fine i'm okay with them i keep those there then if you had an application that was stalling on your mac you could use hung applications to be able to quit or kill one of those apps rather than using activity monitor to do so and heavy consumers this is if you've got an app that is just taking up a bunch of space rather not space but performance on your mac this is great for that it makes sure that that information is not taking up uh that that app is able to be quit or closed and at least you have a little bit more information about what might be taking up so much of the ram or the processing power on your mac maintenance is another great one uh we'll choose view all eight tasks to show you some of the things that it can do first this one is probably the most unclear of the utilities that clean my mac x has uh it's called free up ram and what it does is it kind of temporarily takes up as much ram on your system random access memory as it possibly can to shove out everything else and that kind of helps the mac refresh and go okay we're good we can only take up as much as this app or this app or this app needs uh this is i've actually never used this feature because i never have had an issue where i felt like it was a ram problem but sometimes when you're using a 3d modeling application or photoshop and high high high detail you may run into some ram issues and this could be helpful for that freeing up purgable space uh as you can see when i click on this it says says you can purge up to 87.74 gigs from your disk that means that those 87.74 gigs are space that doesn't need to be taken up on my mac but is right now it's important to understand that this data that's being uh saved in this sort of purgable space is data that the system will use when it's available but it is marked at such a low priority that if you suddenly start to download more stuff to your mac or bring stuff into your mac from a hard disk drive or a flash drive that stuff would get kicked out by the system anyway so this is often just some kind of cache files and different information that sits in the background that isn't necessarily needed so i don't need to remove 87.74 gigs from my disk i've got plenty of spaces it is if i did though or if you have a smaller map a smaller mac storage space this is a great way to to free that space up as it also notes though this is a feature that can be kind of time consuming so you will have to wait for it to finish running maintenance scripts this is something that i is also not incredibly clear they don't go into a great detail on what the maintenance scripts do but they are essentially little trimming and adjusting scripts that will help to clear out cruft uh because that's what happens as you continue to use your system little bits of dust collect all over everything little bits of cruft uh gather in the corners and these little maintenance scripts can help kind of reset things clean things up so i typically do uh run this and as you can see uh clean my mac says this task includes a complex of scripts that rotate system logs remove temporary items and run a number of useful system optimizations uh these are daily weekly and monthly periodic scripts uh they're great to be used all at once to keep your mac os in shape and so yes i every time i open clean my mac x i go ahead and run a maintenance script uh request to clean the system up and it will also work as part of the smart scan flushing the dns cache this is a great way to kind of speed up the system if you have an issue while you're trying to uh visit the internet so if you're on the internet and you're browsing and things are running slow or they don't seem to be running correctly and you're going through the troubleshooting steps your wi-fi seems to be working okay your ethernet's great nothing's wrong there you've restart whatever try flushing the dns cache that can be helpful as well uh this is one of those systems that's a little bit in-depth if you want to understand more about how it works so we won't go into too much about flushing the dns cache but it definitely helps to speed things up and can be a great step in your troubleshooting chain if you're having issues speed up mail if i use the mail app for uh the mac instead of my own third-party mail app this would help do so by kind of once again cleaning out the cache re-indexing spotlight this is a feature that i recommend you be very careful about using because it is a ver if this is a feature that takes a long time basically as you use your mac if you use spotlight to search for things on your mac as i do i pretty much do everything from spotlight which is that little search bar that appears if you hold down command and press the space bar or if you click on the little magnifying glass in the menu bar to find a file on a mac or launch an application on a mac or visit a web page or do a quick search or do some conversions spotlight's very powerful that's why it's how i navigate my mac but over time your mac is supposed to keep track of the files folders applications etc that you have on your mac by what's called indexing with spotlight so what it does is it searches through your whole system and kind of keeps a low level list of everything that's on your mac so that way it doesn't have to kind of restart a search every time you type into spotlight instead it kind of gets to pull from that list that it has that is the spotlight index every once in a while though if you make big changes to your mac or suddenly you uh dump a whole bunch of files onto it from somewhere else you may need to re-index spotlight get that restarted uh and in the past i've had issues where it stopped showing some of the apps that i had and i couldn't figure out why and there was just something wrong with my spotlight index so re-indexing spotlight was what fixed it the last two repairing disk permissions and doing time machine snapshot thinning are great ways to kind of help with your system as well repairing disk permissions this is a very specific uh feature that will help to make sure that either your internal disk or an external disk that you have connected to your mac has the right permission set up so that you are able to access all the files on it again this is one of those troubleshooting steps that you kind of use as part of a chain if you're having trouble getting to the files on an external drive and you should have permission to access those files you shouldn't have an issue pulling and copying or pasting from from that drive repairing disk permissions can help with that as far as time machine snapshot thinning time machine is the built-in backup tool for the for mac os and it will automatically create snapshots of your system that just kind of help you to restore your system to an earlier date but those snapshots can kind of build up over time and get a little heavy and uh fill in and so with time machine snapshot thinning clean my mac x goes through and says okay we don't need all of this data because it's already stored as the the larger time machine backup so these snapshots can kind of be thinned out a little bit and uh cleaned out if they're if they're a little bit older then we've got one of the main reasons that i use clean my mac x this is easily my favorite feature of clean my mac x it is the uninstaller cleanmymac x will keep a list of all of the applications that are installed on your mac and will keep track of how often you use them it will also keep track of you uninstalling and installing apps so for example there is an application called mock-ups studio on my mac that i have not used on this device in a very long time so clean my mac says hey you may want to just get rid of this you're not really using it why do you need to keep it around and i can easily go in and say okay yeah actually that's a good idea i am going to remove it i'm not though because i do use it i just haven't used it on the this macbook air but then i can go back again to all applications i can sort them not just by name but also by their size to find the huge apps and when this is the most important thing when i uninstall an app using the uninstaller built in to clean my mac x typically the way that you uninstall an app on the mac is by going into the applications folder and dragging and dropping or right clicking and deleting the or using the keyboard to delete the application and that application and everything inside gets thrown away but many an app is going to install other little things all over your system into the cache into the launch agent uh folder into the library all sorts of places that it exists and that stuff can build up over time using this uninstaller cleanmymac x looks at the app looks at the code to see what all it says to install whenever it first launches the program and it goes and grabs all those little pieces as well that it installed all over your system and removes them when you do the uninstall that is what makes this feature so amazing and why even if cleanmymac x only had this feature i would still pay for it because it's so great to be able to do those uninstalls i love too that it sorts between where you've gotten the different apps whether they came from the app store or set app which i'll talk about in a moment or from some other place the vendors that have created these apps very handy to know all of that there's also a built-in updater it can be kind of annoying to keep track of different apps and the updates that they have some of those apps that you got from the app store a little easier to download the updates for those but if you got those apps from third parties then you often have to launch the app in the first place and in some cases even need to go in and choose check for updates clean my mac x can keep again a list of the apps that you have installed and regularly check the system to see if there's an update available and then give you an easy way to update that app and install the latest version right here in the application so again another great reason to have it to make sure that your apps are always up to date always have the latest features and i love too that it even if the app supports it we'll pull in the information of what is in that update so handy and then extensions uh these are different extensions that you may have installed on your mac or that have been installed on your mac through the use of different applications so uh one example of this is that for spotlight the search feature there is a plug-in called ibooks author importer and it's a special tool to use with the ibooks author platform uh that works with spotlight but then safari extensions you can see there's a little eye and information icon for these because each of these has to be removed using safari so they let you know unfortunately you can't remove this using clean my mac x but here is where you can go to do that and then preference panes uh one example of this is if you have a i use a backblaze um backblaze as a way to back up my system and backblaze has a preference pane icon so that you can click you can open system preferences click on backblaze and make adjustments there because backblaze itself doesn't really need to have its own app there's not a lot going on there it just goes ahead and lets you do it as if it's part of your system itself so you could check to see those preference panes remove them if you don't want them or be able to access those and then last but not least our internet plugins as you can see i don't have any of those so there's no need to remove those but if you did again easy to make adjustments to those as well i also forgot to mention in the uninstaller there's also the ability instead of uninstalling the application you can actually choose to reset the application so what that does is over maybe you you have an app that you've been using over time and then suddenly it starts giving you trouble and you think oh i'm going to have to delete this app and install it again in order to get it working you can use cleanmymac to basically restore it back to factory settings from the original version of the app and the reason why there uh when i clicked on xsnapper i think it's pronounced snap snapper um it doesn't have the reset option is because i have not launched it on this mac before so there's nothing to reset but had i launched the app then that ability to reset would be there it's a very great it's a very uh easy way to do that troubleshooting of making sure that it is up to date the last options here are called file adjustments there's the space lens what this does is it scans your whole system and then it provides kind of a graph showing you the different file types and different places on your mac where there's a lot of storage being used so it just gives you a visualization of how the storage on your mac has been taken up by the different files folders apps and everything else that's there on your mac so you can just get a quick and handy way to go oh i should remove these movies from my mac because i don't need them anymore because i'm not watching them right now or i could clean out this archive because and put it on my network attached storage instead of keeping it locally on my mac this is what space lens is for just a nice visualization of how your files are being stored and then also gives you the ability to remove files that are maybe huge that you didn't even know were there on your mac so if you start to run out of space space lens can help you out with that large and old files is just a more specific look at those uh files and folders that either you aren't using those are the old ones the ones that have been around forever but have not been updated or have not been modified that's a way to get to those and then large files uh the biggest files that take up the most space on your mac i've used this in the past and like oh right i forgot i had all of that junk in final cut pro all this video that i'm not going to go into those projects and edit those again so let me kick them over to the network attached storage and get rid of them this was a great way to find that and then last but not least is shredder i think this should be an icon of a rat and if you've watched teenage mutant ninja turtles then you'll know what i'm talking about anyway um wait no was he shredder no shredder was the bad guy what was the rat's name anyway back to the back to the show uh shredder lets you remove files and know that they have been truly deleted and removed so when you move something to your trash and you empty the trash it goes away from your site but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's not stored somewhere in your operating system and that that space is just waiting to be taken up at which point then it will be kind of flushed away this will erase a file with all certainty making the file or folder be gone there's no trace of that file or folder anymore so if there's something that you have that you want to get rid of on your mac and want to make sure that it's truly gone that's what shredder can do so that is clean my mac x a very powerful tool for helping you clean up your mac and keep it clean and it along with a few other apps from macpaul is one of the first apps i download when i set up a new mac because i know that there are a lot of files on my mac that i just really don't need they're just sitting in the background taking up a bunch of space so it's very handy to be able to go into my mac and take a look at uh the the system and see what in the world is is taking up so much space on my mac and why a developer may have added all of this extra stuff because in many cases it's just making sure that that app can be supported across the entire system and an ecosystem rather of macs that are out there be the intel or apple silicon you can purchase clean my mac x uh 34.95 for a one year subscription to clean my mac x if you just uh have the one mac they also have a a plan that can give you support for multiple app multiple macs but it is uh easy to check out clean my mac x with that subscription 34.95 a year uh very easy if you if you do want to cancel your subscription but uh i think well worth the price for this app that i use at least once a week to keep my mac clean and this is one that again as i said is uh unfairly sometimes categorized in those sort of scam apps that don't actually do anything for your system but there are powerful tools in cleanmymac x and it is made by a reputable company mac paul that does a great job of creating tools and utilities for your mac to have it running at its best and that's the whole point of this show is making sure you're making the most of those devices so thank you for tuning in to yet another episode of hands on mac i hope you enjoyed today's episode i'd love to hear uh feedback from you if there was uh if you have thoughts on cleanmymac x or other utilities and of course you can reach out to me micah tv m-i-k-a-h at twit.tv this show publishes every thursday to those of you out there who are subscribers either through apple podcasts or via club twit i thank you all for your support for helping make the show a possibility and i will see you next week for another episode of hands on mac goodbye you\n"