I subscribed to CleanMyMac because it was Tidbits recommended. I was not impressed with the product and cancelled. I could not use the Uninstaller because my license expired.
The only way to contact their customer service is to leave a voice mail. Of course, they never returned my call.
Because I could not use their Uninstaller pieces of their code linger on my MacBook.
Do not buy CleanMyMac. The product is not useful and they have NO customer service. The only thing they do well is process your credit card.
It is pure eastern european crap!. It slows down computers. I have had so many clients that tried it and created so many problems. MacKeeper is even worse. Onyx is the only way to go. And techtool pro for diagnostics. Actually Etre Pro is not bad and it directs you to inconsistencies and problems.
Itâs taken me this long to realise something: the app I tried as a Macupdater replacementâApp Cleaner & Uninstallerâis not part of Clean My Mac, it is part of MacCleaner Pro. The latter is written by Nektony in Odessa and provides quick and effective e-mail support. I had cast aspersions on it as I had incorrectly assumed it was related to the questionable app.
It does a good job of completely removing apps (Iâll have to give up on AppDelete being Intel only, and no longer supported since the death of its author), and a thorough job of removing cruft, but as with any you have to check what it thinks can go. It does want to assassinate some files that I know are part of currently installed apps. Itâs app-updating function is very good, and while I have settled on Updatest, I still run it occasionally as it does sometimes find an update that Updatest has missed.
I used Clean My Mac for two years but when I came to renew, the process couldnât complete because of a ânetwork errorâ(?) I tried to contact support but couldnât so in the end I gave up. Iâm not prepared to pay money for (effectively) unsupported software.
Depending on what created the snapshots. Time Machineâs hourly snapshots expire after 24 hours. So deleting them wonât free up a lot of space unless you deleted something big within the last 24 hours. And that space will free itself within a day anyway.
Similarly, CCC makes snapshots on your system volume as a part of its operation (e.g., to keep the source volume from changing while a backup is in progress), but those snapshots should be deleted when the backup task that created them has completed, although I suppose a bug or a crash might leave one lying around.
If youâve manually created a snapshot for some reason, then yes, that space wonât get freed until you manually delete it.
Not only deleting something big, but re-writing a lot of data to the same file (like a read/write disk image, virtual machine virtual disk or databases). Or even deleting a lot of files that existed before a snapshot.
Also, consider if you have Time Machine enabled but the backup disk is disconnected. Local snapshots are still being taken and wonât get deleted until they are flushed to the backup disk. That could result in more than 24 hours of snapshots being kept.
Iâve been using Clean My Mac for many years and never had any problems. I use it when things get wonky, and when things are going well, and it has never caused any issues. Iâve used every bit of the software, and happy to recommend.
Cleaning leftovers is a problem because App developers did not write their installation / removal code properly. Not entirely their fault as Apple added features to make this easy but only in recent years. Itâs not common knowledge among devs. They are more concerned with the App itself and the installation / removal is an after thought. This happens on Windows a great deal as well. Packaging on Windows & Mac is a type of dark art. In the corporate world, we frequently tear apart a package and end up re-packaging it for any number of reasons. Once we found an Realtek audio driver that included a debug keylogger enabled. Something you might find necessary during alpha / beta testing but the keylogger could be abused by bad actors and there was a security CVE published. So we had to yank the package and rebuild it to remove the unnecessary debugging tools and republish to the environment.
A properly written macOS app will have a receipts file listing everything it installed and where. It will also have code to recognize if itâs moved to the trash and remove other left over files. macOS packages can have scripts to run before and after and the best include quality removal scripts.
But sadly many popular Mac applications fail to do these things properly.
Most problems Mac users encounter today are due to 3rd party utility cleaners, anti-virus, and other tools that they really do not need. The second largest problem is not buying enough storage on a modern Mac. The last problem is adware / malware which is less of an issue. Previously, it was prior to SSD and APFS. Even worse before HFS+ Journalling where file system corruption was a serious problem.
If you only install software from the Mac App Store and you donât pirate software nor browse the seedy underbelly of the Internet and donât fall for phishing attacks. Then you wonât have any major problems unless your hardware begins to fail. If you do install 3rd party software, ensure you are downloading it from the official website and that you trust the vendor. There are many bad actors posing as legit software. i.e. MacKeeper is legit albeit poor but there were half a dozen impersonators and that is true for Clean My Mac. Donât click on advertisements nor SPAM emails to install this software many are the impersonators. Go directly to the official website instead.
As to Clean My Mac, emptying user caches is not necessary and does in fact slow things down or could break an App in some rare cases.
If you are running security tools make sure you check if the version you have is compatible before you upgrade to the next major version of macOS. Consider enabling automatic updates on 3rd party software most offer it. Many people experience considerable pain upgrading to the next major macOS release because they failed to check their security endpoint software which may not yet have been upgraded to smoothly handle the changes Apple makes to macOS. Or they failed to update it before they upgraded the operating system. It is recommended to wait at least 90 days after a major macOS update or until Apple has released 2-3 dot release updates to the new version before upgrading. Upgrading day-one is very risky.
The last several years, Apple has been making radical changes to improve security on macOS. This has resulted in a great deal of work for corporate enterprise customers running advanced security endpoints such as Crowdstrike, data loss prevention tools, mesh VPN software, etc.
Many people have a half dozen tools installed that all need to be checked for compatibility before making the leap to a major new release of macOS. They end up on the Apple Discussions community support forums every single time. Had they upgraded these 3rd party Apps prior to upgrading macOS they may not have experienced rather serious problems. The alternative is to uninstall these apps, especially if you are not truly using them.
A clean installation is something that some people should consider if theyâve been upgrading a Mac for several years. Starting over with a data backup and re-installing your applications offers the opportunity to prune out all the cruft that Clean My Mac claims to fix but doesnât fully cleanup. At least not a pristine state.
