Cleaning Out iDevice Cruft From My Mac
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Poking around my Mac laptop, I came across

~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/

and found thousands and thousands of logs and crash-reports for various iPhone/iPad applications that have been accumulating over the years. You'd think that iTunes would clean this stuff up after a while. I deleted it all.

Elsewhere in ~/Library/Logs/ I found random cruft, some dating back three generations of laptops, to 2003.

I deleted it all. It felt satisfying.

Can anyone recommend a “keep things tidy” app, along the lines of Crap Cleaner, which I used to use when I had a Windows box?


All 6 comments so far, oldest first...

You’ve probably heard of this one, but Onyx is a free application that many Mac users seem to use:
http://www.titanium.free.fr/index.php

They also seem to have two other maintenance tools, but I haven’t heard anything about them.

There’s also Yasu:
http://jimmitchell.org/yasu/

I don’t think that any of these do the full clean that you’re thinking of, though. I’d be interested to hear other suggestions as well. My user account has been upgraded from 10.4 through each iteration to 10.,7, and I’m sure that I have a number of items that are either useless or even causing problems…

— comment by David K. on April 25th, 2012 at 12:35pm JST (11 years, 11 months ago) comment permalink

Please post a follow up if / when you find something.

— comment by Boris on April 25th, 2012 at 1:00pm JST (11 years, 11 months ago) comment permalink

I use Hazel for this job (and many others too).

— comment by Steve Hodgson on April 25th, 2012 at 4:24pm JST (11 years, 11 months ago) comment permalink

Let me add in another vote for hazel. Amazing app. Cleaning up log folders is just scratching the surface of what it can do.

— comment by Ray on April 26th, 2012 at 5:24am JST (11 years, 11 months ago) comment permalink

Another vote for Hazel. It used to be free. The new version is no longer free but it’s quite good.

— comment by Gen on April 26th, 2012 at 11:29pm JST (11 years, 11 months ago) comment permalink

After this post I went to look up Hazel but found it confusing and it didn’t really make sense as to how it worked.

In the end I downloaded CCleaner (which I believe is the same app you mentioned about) and claimed back about 4-5GB in caches, log files and assorted other cruft. Very fast too.

— comment by Christopher Pearson on April 30th, 2012 at 5:30pm JST (11 years, 11 months ago) comment permalink
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