MAC TREAT #153: Spring Cleaning

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of cracking open the windows for the first time after a long cold winter. Many times the accompanying burst of fresh spring air inspires a bout of frantic house cleaning. While wiping away winter’s dust and recirculating pent-up musty air can leave you and your abode feeling clean and crisp, it’s important to do some digital spring cleaning too. The more use your Mac gets, the greater the likelihood you’ll eventually encounter a shortage of disk space and overall slowdown. While some file accumulation is certainly inevitable, OS X has a few nasty habits of hoarding data in places it generally doesn’t need to.

One such area is the Mail Downloads folder. Whenever an attachment is previewed with QuickLook or double clicked within a message, Mail automatically saves a copy to this folder. While this doesn’t present much of an issue for small files such as documents and low-res images, if you frequently receive high resolution photos, videos or audio files via Mail attachments there is a good chance that your Mail Downloads folder has become bloated. To wipe out the redundant files in this folder, simply navigate to: Home Folder/Library/Mail Downloads. It’s a good idea to quickly check over the contents of this folder for anything important—though most attachments either reside in their original messages or in the permanent location you’ve elected to save them. Once you’ve given this folder’s contents the once over, trash the files and empty the Trash to reclaim some disk space.

Another frequently forgotten area is iPhoto’s Trash. One of the only included OS X applications to feature a separate Trash, any photos or videos deleted from your iPhoto Library wind up here—not OS X’s main Trash. If you’re an avid photographer and use iPhoto as your primary means of image storage, it is likely iPhoto’s Trash has piled up over time. To empty the iPhoto Trash, navigate to iPhoto in the Menu Bar and select Empty iPhoto Trash—or just press Shift-Command-Delete while in the app. Again, it’s wise to double check the trash’s contents for any accidentally deleted images prior to emptying.

While the two aforementioned tips can be quickly performed by most Mac users, intermediate and advanced users should consider cleaning a bit deeper and wiping out stockpiles of system logs and caches. Terminal savvy users can accomplish this at the command line, but for the rest of us, Titanium Software’s free Onyx utility takes care of the hard stuff. After installing this free utility, sweep your Mac using the application’s Cleaning tab. Here you can select from different system caches and logs to remove. While the space taken up by these files is minimal, you’ll notice previously sluggish apps have a new spring in their step to match the season.

Prior to trying any of these spring cleaning tips we recommend running a full Time Machine backup and throughly checking all mentioned folders and trashes for important files. Though all of these tips can effectively speed up your Mac and free up valuable disk space, you also risk data loss if you are not careful. Clean at your own risk!—a motto I’ll probably end up repeating as I break out the rubber gloves and vacuum at my apartment this weekend.