Clean up Your Mac’s Hard Drive with MacKeeper

Back in February I wrote my initial thoughts on MacKeeper. I was recently contacted by someone from MacKeeper asking me to take another look and to publish my thoughts – I agreed.

Since MacKeeper is such an indepth piece of software, one review probably wouldn’t do it justice. For those of you unfamiliar, MacKeeper is a full suite of maintenance and utility tools for your Mac, and is comprised of four different areas. Those areas are:

• Security
• Data Control
• Cleaning
• Optimization

For the first part of the review I’m going to take a more indepth look at the cleaning part of MacKeeper.

This area is made up of five different components:

• Fast cleanup
• Duplicates Finder
• Files Finder
• Disk Usage
• Wise Uninstallation

Fast Cleanup

The idea of Fast Cleanup is that it will find and remove junk files on your hard drive to free up space. Several months ago I upgraded my hard drive to 300 GB so I was pretty eager to see how much room I could free up. Initially, MacKeeper will perform a scan where it will look through your system. When it’s doing that it will identify all files that are safe to delete (they will be checked) and you can remove those files with one click.

As you can see from the screenshot, Fast Cleanup was able to identify 2.8GB worth of junk files that it would be safe to remove.

Duplicates Finder

I use my computer for both work and personal use, and since I’ve been doing that since 2007 I was really looking forward to seeing how much space I could free up by deleting duplicate files on my Mac. MacKeeper scans your hard drive and groups any identical files even if they were renamed, allowing you to remove  them. At this point, you can either select all files, or choose which ones you want to keep.

MacKeeper found 3.3GB of duplicate files located on my Mac. Needless to say, I got rid of them and I’ve experience nothing untoward happening with my machine (I know some people are wary of just deleting files arbitrarily).

Files Finder

The Files Finder in MacKeeper scans your Mac’s hard drive for all different types of files. For instance, if you want to know where all of your media files are, you can create your own filter. There are preset filers such as Video, Audio, and other – see screenshot below for what kind of sorting you can expect.

I honestly didn’t feel like this would be a feature I would use, but the more I think of it, the more I can see myself using it. I use Quicksilver and Spotlight to help me locate individual files on my Mac when I need them, but there are situations involving work projects when I would want to locate all files involved with that project (then perhaps I would upload them directly to DropBox).

If you’re someone who keeps your Mac really well organized, then this is probably a feature you wouldn’t use all the time, but if you’re like me and your hard drive becomes cluttered, then Files Finder could come in handy.

Disk Usage

Disk usage is useful because it helps you to visualize the size of your files and folders located on your Mac. This helps you to pinpoint and detect large items on your hard drive (in case there are any you didn’t know about, or wished to delete some). Your hard drive is scanned and your folders are sorted and color co-ordinated by size. Green are the smallest files, then yellow, then orange, then red.

Here’s how my largest files were sorted:

Wise Uninstaller

Wise Uninstaller will completely remove applications, widgets, preference panes, and plugins (emphasis on completely). Often times when you drag an application to the Trash there are files remaining which were associated with the deleted program (since those are no longer needed, there is no need to keep them). There are other third party apps which do a good job of removing these files – AppCleaner and AppZapper – but having everything centralized through MacKeeper certainly makes it just that little more efficient.

For example, if I wanted to remove Growl, I would select it, click on the remove button, and the program and all associated files would be removed.

Note: Before you use MacKeeper for the first time I would make a backup of your hard drive. It is always recommended to make backups before deleting files of any kind.