How to Find and Cleanup Junk Files in Mac Catalina?

Mac will work with blazing speed for few months after you have purchased it. However, it will get slower over the period and crawl like a snail. One of the major reasons for slow Mac is running with insufficient storage space. Therefore, it is important to cleanup your Mac in order to work fast. In our earlier article, we have explained how to cleanup your Mac in details. Here, we will explain how to find and cleanup junk files in Mac to increase storage as well as speedup.

How to Find and Cleanup Junk Files in Mac?

There are three ways you can find and cleanup junk files.

• Manual cleanup
• Using default cleanup option in macOS
• Using third-party apps

1. Manually Cleaning Up

The major reason why you accumulate junk files on your Mac is downloading many items from third-party websites. It could be apps, videos, images or documents. For example, after downloading and installing the app, you might have forgotten the installer disk image file (DMG) in “Downloads” folder. 

As a first step, you can manually scan through “Downloads” folder and delete all junk files accumulated over time. In addition, you can also cleanup the “Trash” bin to cleanup the junk files.

2. Using Default Mac Cleanup Option

Apple offers a builtin function to manage storage on your Mac. Click on the “Apple” icon on top left corner and go to “About This Mac” option.

Go to “Storage” tab to view the current status of the available and occupied space on your Mac. Click on the “Manage” button to delete junk files.

On the next pop-up, you can view the detailed storage information occupied by different category of files on your Mac. Under “Recommendations” section, you can find multiple options to improve the storage. Click on “Review Files” button against “Reduce Clutter” option.

This will show you all bigger and junk files along with unsupported apps.

• Large Files – quickly find the bigger files and delete.
• Downloads – view all files in “Downloads” folder with the size to delete them quickly.
• Unsupported Apps – since macOS Catalina will not support 32-bit apps, you can find all unsupported apps in this section.
• File Browser – quickly browser through system folders and check the size to delete any unwanted files. You can easily check “Picture”, “Movies” and “Music” folders to delete old and junk files.

3. Use AVG Cleaner to Delete Junk Files

Though both the above methods are effective, it takes time to check and delete the junk files. It is also not possible to find the applications caches and log files that may accumulated on your Mac. Therefore, the effective way is to use a third-party app to scan your Mac and cleanup the junk.

Go to Mac “App Store” and search for “cleaner”. Depending on your App Store country, you will see many apps available for cleaning disk, memory and OS.

Open the app and click on the “Continue” button. 

Login to your AVG account if you have or click “Skip for Now” button to go to the app.

On the next screen, you will see two options for scanning your Mac to find the junk files and scan septic folder for finding duplicate files. Click on the “Scan Mac” button,

The app will suggest the “Home” folder and ask you to confirm. Press “Confirm Home folder…” button to select the home folder for continuing with scanning.

You may need to authorize the app to access folders on your Mac. 

The AVG Cleaner app will scan your Mac and show the file size that can be cleaned.

Click on the “View Results” button to get the details of the files.

As mentioned, you can check the application caches, logs and junk files using this app. The app by default will only select the recommended files to delete. However, you can click on the arrow against each section to view the details of the files and size.

If you are only focusing on junk files then select it and click on “Clean” button to delete all junk files instantly. You will see a message indicating the size saved by deleting the junk files. You can either go back to the app dashboard or click on the “Select more files” button to select other files to delete.

Similarly, you can scan folders for finding duplicate files and delete them. The app will show the details of duplicate files and allows you to keep old or new to select custom way to delete the duplicate files.

Summary

The easy way to cleanup your Mac is to manually find and delete files. You can also use the “Reduce Clutter” option to view and delete files. However, we recommend you to use the AVG Cleaner or any other free or premium app to delete junk files that you can’t easily find manually.