When it comes to keeping your internal hard disc drive clean, I think we can all agree that the most widely popular alternative for the Mac out there is CleanMyMac, an app that can help you free up disk space by find files that aren’t useful anymore
Today we are reviewing an app from the CleanMyMac developers that brings the awesome disc cleaning that made their main app famous to your external disc drives. It’s a small simple app that’s very fittingly called “CleanMyDrive“. Want to check it out?
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Getting Started
Getting Started
Have you ever browsed through the contents of your flash drives and external disc drives just to find a bunch of unrecognizable files with weird names and extensions, that end up cluttering your file organization and perhaps even taking up precious space? Whether they got there because you plugged your drive to the computer of a friend, or they just came there out of the box, you’ll likely want them gone.
That’s where CleanMyDrive comes in, it’s a free little app that lives in your menu bar and that recognizes the plugged in drives to your computer, giving you the ability to find clutter in them and get rid of it with just one click.
CleanMyDrive
Clean My Drive
More than just a device cleaner, CleanMyDrive also doubles as a device manager. Clicking on its menu bar icon will reveal a list of all of your connected devices, from your internal hard drive, to USB flash drives, external hard drive discs and even your mounted volumes (those little icons that appear on your desktop when you open a DMG).
This makes it super easy to get a quick view of everything that you’ve got connected to your computer and to eject each of them individually or all of them at the same time.
Your Drives
Your Drives
Each drive inside the device list will be shown with a big icon that represents it, the total size of the drive, the used space in the disk, the kind of drive it is (read-only, startup disk, etc.), and a colored bar that represents the used and free space. Besides the little icon of your drive, there’s a button that can give you information on how it can be cleaned. Some drives can’t be cleaned, like mounted drives, and others like your internal hard drive disk will just give you the option to open CleanMyMac to clean them there.
USB flashdrives and external hard drive disks can be cleaned directly from the app with just one click if any junk is found in them. You can also eject drives right from the app, individually or all together at the same time.
Cleaning
Cleaning
In order to find out exactly what it is that CleanMyDrive gets rid of, I tried it with a bunch of devices that I have, like a handful of flash drives and also my external hard drive disk that I use for backups. Immediately when you plug in your drive, it will popup and ask you if you want it to automatically clean up your drive when you unmount it.
Once you tell it to clean it automatically, it will bring you to the main menu, where you will be able to see in the graphic disk space bar the amount of junk it found (if it found any) in comparison with the used space in the drive. CleanMyDrive will consider “useless system-generated data” to be junk, that means that all those files with weird extensions like .DS_Store and .Spotlight will all be erased from your drive, forever.
CleanMyDrive couldn’t find any junk to clean in one of my flash drives and in my external disk drive, because I don’t use them much and they’re don’t contain a lot of files, but it did find a few useless files in my other flash drives, which were basically just a bunch of Thumbs.db files that I had no use for. After cleaning each drive, those files were gone and the disk space that they occupied also got freed up.
Conclusion
More than just a simple device cleaner, CleanMyDrive also works as a hub for getting useful information on the drives that you have connected to your computer. It’s just one click away in your menu bar, and it can immeadiately show you the size, used space and free space of your devices, as well as giving you a quick shortcut for ejecting them safely.
When it comes to actual cleaning, CleanMyDrive works well but it doesn’t do anything that will make a big change for you. I think the app could become indispensable if some sort of virus detection or other kind of added value was implemented. Getting rid of junk is nice, but it isn’t something essential.
It’s nothing you can’t live without, but hey, it’s free and you might get some free space in your drives out of it.