Best Mac Cleaner

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Hello everyone-

Just joined and looking to learn as much as I can. I've had a Mac for almost a decade but relied on my brother to manage my computer life and it's time for me to learn some things on my own. My brother placed MacKeeper on my Mac sometime ago and I had it run a scan just last night. It came back showing some pretty frightful stuff (bunch of red security threats) and I selected it to clean it up and after it started it stopped and said I had reached the capacity for the free amount and it wanted money to finish the job. What I'm trying to figure out is if my Mac is REALLY in a pinch and I need to spend the money to have it cleaned up or if it's just trying to get me to sign up for their service. At the end of the day I want to put something on my Mac and MacBook Air that will clean up the years of me not doing anything to them and see if there are any concerns. They are running good but like a car I'm guessing it wouldn't hurt to have a tune up performed? Any suggestions on what the pro's here feel is the best they like to use and is it really worth spending the annual fee's with some of these apps/softwares given I haven't had any issues in almost a decade. Appreciate any feedback folks have here to offer!
 
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First of al,, MacKeeper is BAD, BAD for your machine. You really need to get rid of it immediately. One of the best ways is to use the excellent freeware program AppCleaner, available from here:

https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/

Secondly, you need to let us know the following:

1. Your exact Mac models that you have.

2. The exact Mac OS you are using on each machine.

3. Have you ever done any disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs, from a software perspective, on either of your Macs? From your description above, I suspect not. You can actually do a good amount of disk cleanup on your own. Also, there are some excellent products available (both free and commercial) that can help you with those tasks. The two EXCELLENT ones I use are the free program Onyx, which you can get from here:

https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html

and TechTool Pro:

https://www.micromat.com/products/techtool-pro

For Onyx, it is critical that you download the correct version for the OS you are using. For TechTool Pro, it has a number of valuable tasks, and depending on your internal drives, it also some has some good, useful ones for Hard Disk Drives, ie HDDs (instead of SSDs. It still has useful ones for SSDs, as well as HDDs).

4. This is so, so critical! Are you making backups to an external device? I cannot emphasize how important that is. Quite frequently, a number of folks come here for help, but they have no backup. That is not a good situation! Time Machine is OK for backups, but a cloning program like either SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner is better.

5. Finally, what third party software do you have? By third party I mean non-Apple software (the bad program MacKeeper is an example of non-Apple software). And for any software that you have, have you kept them up to date?

Once you let us know this information, we can offer a more detailed strategy that you should pursue.
 
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Your Mac runs maintenance for you in the background. Avoid any third party Mac cleaning utilities. These are not much beneficial for you Mac.
Delete the unwanted apps or files which are no longer in use.
Also, it is highly recommended to have the updated backup of your data, this will help you in any data loss scenario.
 
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Unfortunately, the Mac OS does not do an effective job with maintenance. I still use Onyx to various, useful cleaning tasks, and one of them is repairing permissions. Supposedly the Mac OS "takes care of that", but every time I run Onyx on both of my Macs as part of my weekly disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs, and backup, processing, Onyx finds permissions that need to be repaired. And I have to run it twice.

It is even more apparent when I do a clean installation of the Mac OS, and use Migration Assistant to "migrate"/copy needed "stuff" from my SuperDuper! backup. The number of permissions that need to be repaired is quite a lot. Onyx fixes that.

Then of course there are the two excellent disk cleanup/maintenance/repair programs Disk Warrior and Tech Tool Pro. Either of them go way beyond Disk Utility for those tasks. I use Tech Tool Pro (along with Onyx), and I would not be without them. In fact, since Tech Tool Pro still does not have an update available with High Sierra compatibility, I have not upgraded to High Sierra. I am (happily) still running the latest version of Sierra, OS 10.12.6.

As for removing/deleting applications, it is not enough to just drag the app to the trash. An app installs quite a few related files in various locations. So, it is wise to use the excellent free application AppCleaner for that task. It finds just about all the files associated with an application, along (of course) with the app itself.

Finally, yes, an updated backup is so, so critical! Most folks around here use Time Machine, but I much prefer SuperDuper!. It makes a bootable backup/clone of one's system and it makes the task of recovery much, much faster. It is also ideal when performing an upgrade to a new Mac OS. (Carbon Copy Cloner is a similar, stellar product).
 
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Actually you can clean your Mac by yourself and do not waste the money. Just google and you'll find many tutorial materials. Choosing between all cleaners I'd advise using Macfly pro https://macflypro.com/. This one works well and is pretty simple
 
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Yes, there are a number of things one can do on their own to clean their Mac, ad keep it "lean. mean, and clean". One example is to have deleted EMails permanently removed. I am doing that just about every time I use Outlook 2016 when checking my EMail, and the process is really simple. But I don't know how to do it with other EMail programs (Apple's Mail program is what a number of folks around here use).

As mentioned above, Onyx is an excelled, free tool for doing some more cleanup tasks. It has numerous excellent reviews, has been around for quite some time, and does a very good job. One can get it form here:

https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html

Make sure to get the right version for the Mac OS one is using.

Another good program is AppCleaner. Again, it is free, and it finds all the files associated with an application that one is deleting, and thus all that extra stuff can be removed also. It's available from here:

https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/

Finally, if one wants a graphical view of files on their system, there is GrandPerspective, which is also free. It's available from here:

http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/
 

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