6 ways to clean up your Mac computer

A spring comes again and this is also the ideal time to clean up old, unused files over the past year. In our opinion, you should clean your house, garage, or private room. However, it would be a mistake not to remind you to keep an eye on the Mac computer. Here are 6 ways you should pay attention and follow along to clean up your Mac computer.

1. Remove the old logs of iChat

If you use iChat, you can set this software to store logs every chat. (Go to iChat -> Preferences , click on Messages , then select Save Chat Transcripts To , and select a folder to store). By default, the anfy software will save the records in a folder called iChat in the Documents folder, but you can choose another storage location to store the log files.

With this setting, iChat will save a log file of each chat. This is really a great idea (and really handy for work) if you often have to recall a conversation. However, if you send photos while chatting, these files will take a lot of space. If you look at the iChat folder, you will see these files sorted by date. Although you may want to store recent chat logs, the files recorded from the previous months are what you can put in the trash, saving a lot of hard drive space.

2. Delete application backups

Many software offer automatic backup, and save file copies to a folder, just like iChat saves logs. The two software we commonly use are Bare Bones Software's BBEdit or OmniFocus's OmniFocus to do so. Some applications, such as OmniFocus, allow you to choose where to store your backups, while others like BBEdit, do not allow it. BBEdit stores its backups in a folder called BBEdit Backups in the Documents folder.

If you use any application that stores backups, you'll see that they have gigabytes of duplicate files, depending on how the software saves them. (BBEdit saves a backup every time I save a file). Deleting these backup files can save you space and make OS X's Spotlight search much easier.

When you delete it, check the tenuoidung / Music / iTunes folder, you'll see a folder called Previous Libraries , containing copies of the iTunes library saved after you install a new version.

3. Remove downloaded Mail versions

When you receive an attachment from the email message in the Apple Mail application, the file will be saved in the message first. However, if you double-click an attachment to open it, or if you use QuickLook to view it, Mail saves a copy to the tennguoidung / Library / Mail Downloads folder. You may have dozens of files here and they will take up a lot of hard drive space. Even so, you can still delete them without any concern. If you still have the original message, the attachments are always part of these messages. If not, you still have an attachment on your hard drive.

4. Delete the logs

Your Mac computer keeps a lot of log files, most of them you never need to review. Open the Console application (in / Applications / Utilities ), to see a list in the Console Messages window sidebar.

The various log files saved on the Mac computer will be listed in the Console window.

You can delete many of them without affecting your computer, as well as save a lot of hard drive space because some of them are quite large. For example, in the screenshot above, you can see a lot of system.log log files. The first file system.log is the current file, but the other files, with the .bz2 suffix, are all archived files.

Delete these files with Titanium Software's free Onyx tool. Run the software, click Cleaning in the toolbar, and then click the Logs tab. Check the System Archived Logs , and then click Execute . While using Onyx, check other files this software can be erased to clean up hard drive space on Mac computers.

5. Remove all duplicate files on iTunes

If you don't often monitor your iTunes library, you may have lots of duplicate files. Itunes has a built-in feature to help you find duplicate files, to know if you have copied a file twice or not, or if you have the same song on the original album and in another album .

To use this feature, choose File -> Display Duplicates . After that, all songs with the same name and author will be displayed. If you hold down the Option key when selecting the File menu, this menu will change to Display Exact Duplicates . This will help you filter duplicates with the same name, author and album. Carefully check the files. You can see some files that should be removed, to help reclaim valuable Mac drive space, as well as on iPad and iPhone.

iTunes can search for duplicate files in the library.

Still, finding duplicate files in iTunes still has some limitations. Doug Adams's Dupin software, priced at $ 15, gives you the power to remove duplicate files, filtering by many criteria. If you have too many music files in the iTunes library, Dupin is the best way to filter them.

6. Reset Safari browser

If you use Apple's Safari browser, some features of this software may take up a lot of unnecessary storage. For example, the cache file is used to make your browser more compact, but it takes up quite a bit of space, possibly up to Megabytes. When it becomes too large, it will slow down your browsing speed. Log files can make Spotlight search difficult. Besides, Top Sites, image previews, Websites icons can also slow down this software.

For now, please reinstall the Safari browser. Select Safari -> Reset Safari and check the options you like.

In this window, you can select Safari items to reboot and delete.

In the screen capture, you may see we didn't choose to restart or delete everything. Choose what is most important to you, and restarting Safari regularly will help speed up web browsing as well as save hard drive space.

Final tip: Have you noticed your Downloads folder ( download / Downloads )? Probably, you will see lots of unnecessary copies in it. Please check and delete if you do not use these files.