Hello, everyone. David A. Cox here with Tech Talk America, and today, I’m going to be teaching all of you at home how you can easily clean your Mac. Now for those of you out there who’ve watched my little tutorial videos over the years, in the past when I’ve taught this class, I taught you manually how to go to every nook and cranny and find everything and clean it out. I’m not going to do that today. I’m going to give you a bunch of different tricks, but what I’m going to really focus on today is featuring a piece of software that can not only help automatically go to those places and find that junk and clear it out, but also in addition to that, we’re going to talk about the things that you can do to keep your Mac running efficiently so that it runs faster in general, and that’s going to be tricks for everyone. So even if you don’t get the software that I’m going to recommend, this is still going to help you. So, I hope you enjoy it and, by the way, links to everything you need, you’re going to find down below in the description of the video.How to clean your Mac, coming up next on Tech Talk America. All right, folks, so the first thing I would like to ask you to consider doing is before we get started here, take a look at how much free space you have on your Mac right now. If you’d like to participate, you know I encourage participation. Leave me a comment down below. Let me know around how much space you got back by the end of this class. So, the first feature we’re going to go over is something that you may have at one point accidentally turned on during a system update to your Mac, and that feature is called File Vault, and if we turn it off, you’re going to be amazed not only at how much free space you get back but also how much faster everything runs. First let’s figure out if you actually have it turned on. So, let’s go to the little Apple icon that we have here at the top left corner, and we’re going to go in to System Preferences.From here, we’re going to go into security and privacy. Now from here, we’re going to go into the second tab, which is File Vault, and you’ll notice that on my screen currently, A, it’s grayed out, and B, it says turn on File Vault. If I wanted to enable this, I would have to first click the little lock icon down here and then type in the administrator password. However, that’s not what I’m going to recommend to a lot of you. What file vault basically does is it encrypts
all of your data so it’s much, much more secure, but the thing is is that the main type of security that at least I tend to think a lot of people should be more concerned about is their passwords, not so much encrypting their local data.That’s not as big a problem. Now if you’re a high-profile person, and I have a few clients who are, yeah. Then in that case, this is probably a very good idea, but otherwise, I think you should probably consider turning it off because in the process of doing so, it’s going to dramatically speed up your computer, and you’re also going to get back a very significant amount of space. I just did this yesterday for a client of mine actually, and she ended up getting back over a hundred gigabytes just from doing that one little trick. Just be aware that if you currently have it turned on and then decide to turn it off, it has to go through a very lengthy process of decrypting all of your data. So, it is the kind of thing that you might want to consider doing overnight since it can take upwards of, I’ve seen, eleven to twelve hours.The next thing I want to do is I want to kind of show you where to go in general to diagnose where is your clutter problem coming from. So, let’s go to the Apple icon at the top left and go to About This Mac. From here, we’re going to go to the third tab, which is storage. When you’re looking at this graph, and it’s going to take a minute to kind of assemble it, it’s going to give you a kind of a layout. You can put your cursor over it, and it’s going to say, “Okay, you’ve got this much documents. You got this many apps,” et cetera. In general, the thing to know about this graph is you want to always make sure that at least 20% is available. If you have less than 20%, it is very normal to experience apps crashing and to get that little spinning beach ball some people call the spinning beach ball of death.Cute, right? What I want to do is, over the course of this next little chapter, I’m going to show you how to go through and kind of start to diagnose each of those because for a lot of people, it’s like they have one thing that they do a ton of. So, what we’re going to do from here is we’re going to go into manage, and this is going to get us some really awesome tools that we didn’t have until recent years in the operating system, and we’re going to start to be able to find where is the bloatage coming from.From here, let’s go into
review files down at the bottom right. On this screen, you’ll see we have three different tabs at the top. We have large files, downloads, and file browser. So, depending on where your clutter problem is coming from, this may help you. Although as you will see momentarily, this actually did not find everything. So here under large files, it’s looking for individual large files, and so my advice is to organize this by file size, and then if there’s anything here that you really don’t need, if you put your cursor over it, you’ll notice there’s a little X that appears right next to it.If you click that X, it will immediately delete it. Please note, it does not go to the trash. It’s gone immediately. If you need to find out where the file is coming from, you can click on the little spyglass icon next to it. Next, if we go here into the Downloads tab, you’ll see what it’s really looking for here more than anything is DMG files. So DMG files are typically very large. They’re used to install software that you downloaded from the web, but if you have DMG files on your computer, once the software is installed, you really don’t need them anymore. So, this is typically something you can pretty safely delete, and then we have file browser, which is just going to show you kind of a layout of where is everything coming from.Let’s go through a few other little tricks to get back some space. One I want to talk about is right here, which is iOS files, and if you see anything in here, let me just kind of tell you generally speaking what it is for most people. If you see anything in this list, it’s going to be old backup files of your iPhone and/or iPad, or even possibly, I don’t even know. iPod might even show up on there. Here’s the thing. Back with the way that iTunes used to work, this is really before iCloud got involved, you tended to have a backup file of your phone and other devices on your computer. Now because of iCloud, there really is no need for that. So, for the most part, you know you can pretty much take anything that you see in this list, and you can wipe it out, and typically those files tend to be a few gigabytes a piece. So that alone should help you out a little bit.Next one we have here is iTunes. One of the things that’s important to remember about iTunes, this goes back to something similar with iOS, is that a lot of times when people would have something like an iPhone, they would plug
it into their computer, right? When you did that, there was an option back in the day to where you could tell it to sync apps, and so for a lot of you out there, you may discover that you actually have a copy of those apps on your computer. If you want to kind of find out where that really is, let me just show you where to go here. So, you’d open up Finder, you’d go into your home folder, the one with a little house icon, and then in there, you go into music, iTunes, and it’s going to be in here. I believe it’s mobile apps, something like that, and for the most part, you can pretty much delete anything that you have there. There’s some other things to keep in mind also about iTunes. Like for example, you might have old podcasts laying in there that you can now delete.That may have shown up on some of on the previous screen where it’s giving you the recommendations. Another one, very common for a lot of people they can clear out, is GarageBand. You know, I wish more people liked GarageBand. I think it’s actually kind of cool, but admittedly, I don’t really even use it all that much. I tended to be more of a video guy, but if you don’t use GarageBand, you may have some sound files that are on your Mac, and frankly, they’re actually quite large. So, if you want, you can just click remove GarageBand sound library and get rid of those. All right, everyone. The next tool that I want to show you does a few different things. In general, we’ll just kind of find some of those junky files and allow you to save a little bit more space, but the other thing that it does is it gives you a bunch of different tools that just help your Mac run a little bit more efficiently.It is a paid piece of software, but if you want to try it with no obligation, there is a direct download link in the description of the video, and what you can basically do is run it and just see if it finds anything. Again, that’s really only part of the software. The other part here is about keeping it running efficient for the future. So that’s where I would tend to recommend it. The next piece of software that we’re talking about is called CleanMyMac 3, and when you first load it up, the first thing you’re going to do is hit scan, and it’s just going to go through a bunch of different locations on your Mac, looking for those junky types of files. Now granted there is going to be some overlap here with the previous method that I just showed you,
but as you will see, it actually finds files that Finder didn’t find. I know. I find that statement very confusing.Finder didn’t find it, but anyways, you get the idea. So, I’m just going to kind of let this crank through. Keep in mind, this is a demo account, so it’s probably not going to be nearly as dramatic as it would be on your computer. So, we’ll just let it finish up, and as you’ll see, it’s going through fairly quickly. We’re at under a minute right now. So just going through, doing its thing. The thing that you’re going to be most impressed with, I think, is the large and old files. Now just to refresh your memory. So, it’s saying it found nine gigs available for safe cleanup, but if you check this out here, large and old files, it’s actually found 325 gigabytes of additional files that I might be able to dump. So, as we go through here, the first one we have is system junk. Things like old cache files, logs, et cetera. For the most part, these are pretty safe to dump.So, without a problem, hit clean. Photo junk. I’m not going to go into a big explanation of this, but my recommendation is do not run that feature. You can see any of those old attachments that are stored in your computer right here. iTunes junk, similar to what we went over earlier, but this actually does find some other stuff that you wouldn’t find just probably by poking around through the iTunes folder, and of course, this does it a lot easier. So pretty safe. You can hit the clean button here and get back whatever you want. Trash bins, yeah, this part doesn’t really do much. It’s just emptying the trash, and then we have the last one here, which is large and old files. Now, I want to just kind of refresh your memory here.If we go back to the previous screen. Oops, sorry, that was memory. Storage, manage. It told me on the Mac that the largest file I had was 3.75 gigabytes. Hmm, funny because this shows another file that is 60 gigabytes, which is the library folder, which would be a very, very significant sized file to forget about. So, as you can see here, CleanMyMac 3 does do a better job than just the built-in tools in your Mac. So through here, you can go through and use these tools to find the largest and smallest files and clean them all up, and then you’ll see down here at the bottom left, we have a few different utilities to help keep your Mac running efficiently, and some of these really, you don’t run so
much through the app. They just kind of run in the background. The first one here is the uninstaller. What’s great about the uninstaller is if you go and just trash an app, it automatically goes and it finds all those little hidden library files and cleans those out as well.Very nice tool to have. The next one we have here is a maintenance tool, and well, some of these you can do right through your Mac. You would have to manually go through and do each one of these one at a time, and with this, it just does all of them at once. So, the idea here is you might want to probably consider doing this at night. It is going to typically take a little bit longer. Good idea in general, maybe, to run this once a month, maybe once every other month. Privacy, so things like your browsing history, your download history. You can just go through here, check these items, hit remove, boom, they’re gone. Also, things like passing iMessages history, recent things that you’ve opened on your Mac, these really don’t take up so much space. This is really not necessary.Extensions. There’s a whole bunch of different extensions here that talk to your computer, but it is a good idea to just kind of go through these and just make sure that they are all legit. The one that I would especially recommend that you spend some time on is the Safari extensions, or whatever web browser you have and the extensions. The reason why I point this out is this is how adware can hide on your computer. Not exclusively, but that’s one of the places where it can hide. Then the final tool that we have here, I absolutely love, which is called the shredder, and it has a couple of different features that it uses, and I want to just give you a real-life example of how this saved my butt.So, I, like everyone, occasionally make mistakes, and I accidentally deleted a file about, or tried to delete a file, about two years ago. It caused this giant mess on my Mac, and every single time I went to empty the trash, it gave me all these little notifications, and I had to hit continue about literally 200 times just to empty my trash. I was on the phone with Apple, and there was just no good method to be able to clean these files, and the shredder tool did it in two seconds.So, a very, very good tool. It runs in the background, and when you go to delete certain types of files that can absolutely give you problems if you just try to do them without
this software, this just makes it that much easier. As you will also notice here, there is a feature to individually select a specific file and immediately go through and scrubs that data clean. So, with that, you just hit select files, point it to wherever your file is, and then it’ll, boom, wipe it out clean. All right, folks. So, the last trick I have for you is if you open up your Finder window, I want you to go to your home folder, go into your pictures folder, and in this case here from demo account of course, we see just a Photos library. Now for quite a few of you out there, you may discover that you still have on your computer your old iPhoto library. If that’s the case, basically let me kind of explain what happened.For those of you who have been Mac customers for a while, of course, before there was the application that is now known as Photos, we had another older application called iPhoto, and basically iCloud was the big reason why things kind of converted from one to the other. Also, in terms of making things a little bit more consistent in the experience, and so what happened was your old iPhoto library was then migrated into what became your Photos library. Now at this point, I would like to let you all know that it is completely a normal reaction to have a massive anxiety attack just before hitting the Delete key on your old iPhoto library. I get it. Everyone has a fear of deleting their old photos. So, before you do that, let me give you one last little trick that, if you want to, you can do just to make sure that you have everything. What you can do is if as long as you still have iPhoto on your computer, you can still open your old iPhoto library, then go back in time to your very first photos, and just get a visual sense of what they are.Then, quit out of iPhoto, open up Photos, the newer software, and go back to that same period in time. As long as you see everything there, there’s a pretty darn good chance that you have everything from there forward, and if you want to go one additional step further, you might want to consider getting a really inexpensive flash drive, if you need a recommendation, I’ll throw you a link down below, that’s big enough to support your entire Photos library. So that would have, of course, the old data and the new data.Then, just take your whole Photos library and throw it on that flash drive. If you can, try to remember to update it a couple
of times a year and put it in something that’s preferably fireproof and waterproof. Thank you for watching, everyone. If you enjoyed this video, if you got back some space on your Mac, I hope you’ll consider hitting that little like button. This is David A. Cox with Tech Talk America. I’ll see you next time. Take care, everyone. Class dismissed. .
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