What Is Disk Cleanup and What Are its Benefits?

Cleaning up and organizing your disk space is an essential maintenance task to keep your system functions in optimum working condition. It also helps you recover considerable amounts of disk space and keeps your RAM from overclocking. Although there are several benefits of regular disk cleanup of your Mac or windows system, there are somethings that you should consider before performing a disk cleanup. In this article we shall take a look at the do’s and don’ts of disk cleanup.

What Does Disk Cleanup Do?

In a nutshell, disk cleanup searches for old temporary files, obsolete installation files, log files, internet history and cache, error reports, save offline content and error logs etc. on your computer. All these files might have been used or created by your system at some point, but are no longer necessary and can be removed. It also scans for any old updates that were downloaded by your operating system, which could take up significant amount of space on your hard disk.

Advantages of Disk Cleanup

Prevents Hard Disk from Over clogging – A fully occupied disk space not only keeps you from storing more data, but also puts a considerable amount of load on your system performance. By removing junk from your computer you’re literally providing the RAM, more room to breathe. This in turn results in faster system functions and fewer application crashes.

Old Files Can Interfere with New Programs – Whenever we choose to uninstall or update an application to its latest version, there are several files that are left behind by the older version. While the files are mostly harmless, they could interfere with your program’s functioning. Such redundant files should be deleted regularly from your system for best results.

Cyber Crime Security – Not many computer users might be aware of this, but hackers and cyber criminals can easily retrieve your personal information and other details from your computer. Even if you do not store these details directly on your computer, your internet history, system cache and other such files can be easily targeted by criminals to get hold of your sensitive data. Cleaning your disk regularly will keep your system free from such files from where your sensitive information could be leaked.

Disk Cleanup On Mac

While windows users can do a disk cleanup by directly using the inbuilt disk cleanup feature, Mac users might have to do some manual searching. Removing temporary files, system cache, OS updates, and obsolete files that you don’t need might be monolithic task depending on your system and data size. You could also use cleanup tools such as the Disk Analyzer Pro, which can actually reduce the amount of time and effort required for a thorough cleanup.

Why Use Disk Analyzer Pro?

1. Time Saving – Manual disk cleanup could take from 10 minutes to an entire day, depending on the amount of data to be cleaned. Disk Analyzer Pro automatically scans for any files and programs that are no longer required by your system. This not only helps save time, but will keep you from searching frantically prevent frustration.
2. Space Analyzer – Even if your system is free from any obsolete any temporary files, there could still be a lot of data that could be deleted for extra space. Disk analyzer pro’s smart scan algorithms identifies all the scanned file types and displays them to the user. This would help the user get a better idea of file types that take more space.
3. Organized Folder View – Personally locating folders for removable files is certainly a tedious task especially when dealing with voluminous data. Disk Analyzer Pro puts all these folders and subfolders in an organized view with their size, name, path. You can also check the last modified date to know what files are old and can be deleted.
4. Custom Views – You could view the scanned data according to various tags such as size unit, size, location, file type and date etc. to pinpoint the bulky and useless files. You can also choose or omit a particular folder from being scanned by the software.

Even though there are plenty of programs and software that could free up disk space on your Mac, not many of them pack as many features and user-friendly interface as Disk Analyzer Pro. If you still want to check other options, here’s our list of 10 Best Mac Cleaner Software to speed up your mac.