Keep your Mac tidy with MacKeeper

You love your Mac and you want to keep it happy and healthy. Regular updates are a means to that end, but only a part of what's necessary. Additional TLC that your Mac will find beneficial include clearing up space-hogging clutter like old cache files and unused binaries. Otherwise your hard drive will look like an episode of Hoarders.

You can also ditch unused language support, logs and more. For all of this, there's MacKeeper. I used it over the weekend and now my MacBook Pro is leaner and meaner (well, leaner). MacKeeper made the process easy and added a few unexpected, pleasant extras. Here's what I found.

User Interface

MacKeeper's UI should look familiar to anyone who's used iTunes, iPhoto or a slew of other popular Mac applications. That's a good thing, as you already know how to find your way around. The app's window has two main areas: The list of services on the left and the content browser on the right. To the far right is a collapsable "support area." It provides links to video tutorials of each of the app's features and access to 24/7 support via email, phone or live chat. I didn't expect that. What a nice touch.

The far-left area divides the app's functions into three sections, namely cleaners, tools and services.




Cleaning your Mac

When first launched, MacKeeper gets to work scanning your hard drive. What's it after? There are six main file types it looks for:

1. Binaries. The core of Mac apps contains two parts, making it possible to run on both an Intel- and PPC-based Mac. Since most of us use one or the other, the extra files are sitting around taking up space.
2. Cache files. These things get bloated quickly. MacKeeper found 1GB of cache files on my Mac.
3. Duplicates. This function finds identical files, even if they have been re-named. Once a full list is produced, you can easily find the ones that aren't necessary and dispatch them.
4. Language clutter. The Mac OS and most apps come with support for several languages. Most users do their computing in only one. You can remove the unnecessary files and reclaim some space. MacKeeper represents each language with its nation's flag and sorts them alphabetically or by size.
5. Log files. Oh, log files. You store info that I might find useful someday. Maybe. All the while, you get fatter and fatter. Now meet your doom. MacKeeper can nix a log file without affecting its parent app's performance.
6. Old files. This one is kind if tricky. It searches for files that have not been used in a long time. Well, just because a file is "dormant" doesn't mean it's unwanted, so look through here carefully before you hit the delete button. Bonus: Use this function to find files you thought disappeared long ago.

MacKeepr takes a few minutes to scan your entire HD at launch, so go and make a sandwich while it runs. Once it's done, the fun begins. Onto the tools section.

Tools

MacKeeper does more than delete unwanted files. For example, you can schedule backups of folders, groups of folders or your whole drive to either an external drive, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV or the forthcoming ZeoDisk. Launch a backup manually or create automated schedules to run hourly, daily, weekly or monthly.

The Data Encryptor adds encryption to the files or directories you select. Those files will only be accessible from within MacKeeper once encryption is set up.

There's more of course, like login item management (much like the Accounts system preference pane) and something called the Shredder, which works like secure empty trash in the Finder.

Services

In addition to all of the functions, there are three services that work in tandem with MacKeeper: Anti-theft, Geek on Demand and ZeoDisk. The Anti-theft service is pretty neat. Once enabled, it logs your Mac's connections, geographical location, IP address, etc. If it gets stolen, you can log in to your account from any web browser and click the "Mac Stolen!" button. The service will be notified and begin monitoring your Mac. The next time it goes online, it will report back to the service with the preceding information (if it has a camera, it will begin covertly taking photos every 5 minutes, too).

An agent will email you and call (so you needn't check email every five minutes) with a report that you can send to the police. Neat!

The Geek On Demand feature is kind of like a help ticketing system. Once you've created an account, you submit your question and -- this is key -- the time when you'll be available to receive a reply. How cool is that?

When the time arrives, a support technician will call you and explain the issue, or even operate your Mac, screen sharing style. Nice!

Finally, ZeoDisk will provide 3GB of online storage when launched.

MacKeeper does a whole lot and quite easily. It'd be worth it for cleanups alone, but add in scheduled backups, data encryption, "undelete" (which helps recover accidentally deleted files) Wise Installer and more, and you've got a heck of a nice application. For US$39.95 you get a lifetime license license. If you want to add the services described above, you'll pay $39.95 per year. In either case, MacKeeper is definitely worth your time and attention.
Share