Clear junk from your Mac's disks with CleanMyDrive

Over time, disk drives SSDs and thumb drives accumulate junk files and these consume valuable space that could be used for more useful purposes. CleanMyDrive 2 keeps them clean and junk-free.

The junk files that build up on drives are not obvious and you won't find them easily in Finder windows, so it is not easy to keep a disk clean and healthy. However, there are utilities, such as CleanMyDrive 2, that make keeping a disk clean a very simple process.

The sort of files that are classed as junk by the app include .DS_Store, .Spotlight-V100, .TemporaryItems, .fseventsd, Thumbs.db, RECYCLED, RECYCLER, $RECYCLE.BIN, Resource fork files like ._MyPhoto.jpeg, deleted files that are in the Trash, and so on. None of these is important and so it is safe to delete them.

View and clean drives

CleanMyDrive 2 is a free utility for macOS (my favourite sort) that can be downloaded from the Mac App Store. It adds a drive icon to the menu bar on the right-hand side. When it is clicked, it lists all the drives (partitions) attached to the Mac, internal, external, hard drives, SSDs and thumb drives. When an external drive is plugged into the Mac, it is added to the list and automatically scanned for junk files.

If any junk files are found on the drive, a Clean button is displayed underneath it. Click it and the junk files are deleted. The amount of junk present on drives varies and it can be as little as a few kilobytes or many megabytes or even gigabytes. It depends on the size of the drive and how much it has been used.

External drives can appear on the Mac's desktop and in Finder windows, and they work the same way here in CleanMyDrive in case you have them hidden elsewhere. Click a drive icon to open a Finder window to browse the drive contents. Drag files to the menu bar icon to open the drive list and then drop them on a drive to copy them there. Click the eject button to remove one drive or click the Eject All button in the top left corner.

View space usage on drives

The total drive size and the amount of space free is displayed next to each drive, which makes it easy to keep an eye on drives that are nearly full. Drive space usage is shown in the horizontal bar next to a drive and the colours indicate different types of content such as photos, apps, audio, movies and so on.

Let the mouse hover over a colour and the type of content and the space used is displayed. This is useful if you need to know what is using all the space on a drive.

Automatically clean drives

CleanMyDrive does not clean the Apple Mac’s internal boot drive, Windows Bootcamp partition, or a disk or partition that is being used for Time Machine backups. This means that it won’t delete anything that might be considered important.

Move the mouse over the dot at the left side of a drive and it turns into a gear icon. Click it and there are a couple of useful options. Automatic cleanup automatically cleans junk files on the drive when it is ejected, which prevents junk from building up.

Right at the top is an Eject All button that removes all mounted drives. However, if there is one you need, it can be set to Always keep mounted. That drive will not be ejected.

There is an option to automatically run CleanMyDrive when you log into the Mac or you can run it manually from the Applications folder when it is needed.

Summing up

CleanMyDrive 2 is a very simple app that does its intended job very well. You do need to remember that files deleted on external drives are erased and cannot be recovered though. This does not affect files moved to the Trash from the Mac's internal disk, only external USB drives and USB flash memory drives.

The app does not affect any files you might want to keep, just the temporary items in removeable drives, so it is safe to use.

Product: CleanMyDrive 2
Company: MacPaw
Size: 8 MB
OS X: 10.10 or later