Even these days, MacBooks still have tiny hard drives that fill up quickly. Luckily there are quick and easy ways to free up space on your hard drive. Here’s how to clean up your Mac and reclaim some drive space. A window on the interface informs about the capacity of the hard drive as well as the used and free space availability. To clean up Mac, and create more disk space, this best free Mac cleaning software is an ideal choice. Key Features of Disk Doctor: This Mac cleaning app helps remove gigabytes of junk from the drive within a few minutes.
Wipe or erase hard drive data completely clean with the free Active Kill Disk. This software is available as both a free and a pro version.Utilities like Active Kill Disk are very useful and a must have software for windows users (especially enterprise and business users of windows) to ensure data security by preventing its leakage.
When you delete a file in windows, the OS merely deletes the handle to the file so that users will not be able to retrieve the file directly.However, the file is still retained in the hard drive and it can be retrieved using good data recovery software. It must be noted that even formatting a disk does not delete data or files completely.
When using the FORMAT command in Windows, you may receive the following message.
Important: Formatting a disk removes all information from the disk.
In reality, the FORMAT utility actually creates new FAT and ROOT tables, leaving all other existing data on the disk untouched! Moreover, an image of the replaced FAT and ROOT tables is also backed up, so that the UNFORMAT command can be used to restore them. In addition, even the FDISK utility cleans the Partition Table (located in the drive’s first sector) and does not do anything else.
Thus, data can be retrieved from your hard drive or disk using sophisticated data recovery software. Hence, to ensure that data is completely wiped or erased from the hard drive, it is recommended to use good hard drive erase utilities like Active Kill Disk.
Features of Free Hard Drive Erase Utility Active Kill Disk
- Detects and displays information about all partitions, hard disks and floppy drives attached to your computer
- Completely wipes out all floppies and hard disk drives by secure overwriting of data using data destruction method.
- Erases partitions, logical drives and even unused disk space
- Creates a report which can be saved as a file
- Supports SSD, IDE, SATA and SCSI drives
- Supports larger than 128GB hard disks using LBA(LBA48) mode to access the drive’s data
- Data is erased using low-level disk access and this does not depend on File systems
- Double confirmation excludes possibility of accidental erasing of data on a drive
- Has an intuitive console interface for all users and a command line mode for the advanced users
- Works on any system which can boot from a floppy in DOS mode
- A compact utility and you do not even need to boot from the hard drive to destroy it
- Cleans the hard drive, floppies, etc.
Download the free Active Kill Disk from here and double-click KILLDISK-SETUP.EXE. Follow the instructions on the installation wizard to install it.
How to erase hard drive data and files with free Active killdisk?
- 1. Start the Active KILLDISK for windows from the Programs menu. All system physical devices and logical partitions are displayed in a list. Hard drive devices are numbered by the system BIOS. A system with a single hard drive shows as number 0. Subsequent hard drive devices are numbered consecutively.
- 2. On selecting a drive you may get the detailed information about it on the right pane.
- 3. Ensure that the drive you are pointing to is the one that you want to erase or the one you want to wipe. If you choose to erase, all data will be permanently erased with no chance for recovery.Hence, it is important to ensure the correctness of the selected drive. You can preview the sectors in a drive by pressing “CTRL + V” or clicking “View Data” on the toolbar.
- To scroll up and down, use the keyboard arrow keys or use the related buttons on the toolbar. To jump to a specific sector, type the sector number and press “ENTER” or click “Go” on the toolbar. When you are satisfied with the identification of the drive, press “ESC” to close this screen.
- To preview the files in a logical partition, select the partition and press ENTER. KillDisk scans the MFT records for the partition.
- Press TAB to move between panels or choose a panel with the mouse. To select an item in the list, use PAGE DOWN, PAGE UP or the up or down arrow keys or use the mouse. To open a folder, double-click the folder or select it and press ENTER.
KillDisk scans the MFT records for this folder. The files in the folder appear in the right panel. Existing files and folders marked by yellow icons and deleted files and folders marked by gray icons. Note that if you are wiping data (read about wiping data below) from unoccupied areas, the gray-colored file names are removed after the wiping process completes. You may use Data Viewer to inspect the work done by the wiping process. After wiping, the data in these areas and the place these files hold in the root records or MFT records are gone.
- 4. When you have selected the device to erase, select the check-box for this hard drive. To permanently erase all data on the selected partition, press F10 or click Kill on the toolbar. The Kill dialog box appears. Choose an erase method from the drop-down list. Set all other parameters for erasing. Click Start.
- 5. If the Skip Confirmation check box is clear, the Confirm Action dialog box appears. This is the final step before removing data from the selected drive forever. Type ERASE-ALL-DATA in the text box and press ENTER or click YES. The Progress bar appears. To stop the process at any time, press ESC. Please note, however that data that has already been erased will not be recoverable.
That is it. The application will wipe out or erase hard disk data. If there are any errors, for example due to bad clusters, they will be reported on the Interactive screen. If such a message appears, you may cancel the operation (by pressing ESC), or you may continue erasing data.
How to wipe hard drive data and files with free Active KillDisk?
You can also wipe data in unoccupied areas on selected logical drives using Active Kill Disk! The steps here are almost the same as erasing data from hard drive. To wipe data, you will have to choose the device and press F9 or click Wipe and a Wipe Free Disk Space dialog appears. you may then choose a wipe methods, wipe parameters and then click Start to start wiping data on the hard drive.
Enjoy the free tool to erase hard drive or wipe hard drive on your PC completely clean.
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Apple's Mac computers are known for being fast and user-friendly, which makes it easy to stock your Mac hard drive full of photos, music, videos, documents and random files. While Macs don't have a reputation for crashing, they do have a reputation for getting sluggish when overloaded. To clean the Apple Mac hard drive is indeed necessary. There are some tips to clean up your Mac.
Tips to clean up your Mac
Empty your Trash
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The most basic thing is to empty your Trash regularly. Unless you're unsure of whether you may need a deleted file later, there's no reason to have a Trash brimming with files. But this is not the only trash you need to empty. Empty the trash in iPhoto, iMovie, and Mail too.
Remove applications you don't use
Your Apple Mac comes with a lot of commercial applications on a trial basis (like Microsoft Office, FileMaker etc.). If you know that you're not going to use those applications, clean up them! Open your Applications folder (with command-shift-A in Finder), drag unused applications to the Trash and then empty the Trash.
Remove disk images from downloaded files
Whenever you download applications to install, delete the disk image (.dmg) files.
Clean web browser caches
To improve performance, all web browsers store downloaded pages and files in a cache so that they can reuse those files (instead of re-downloading them) if you visit those same pages again. Cleaning the cache could provide some free space. Although cleaning the cache for security reasons is a good thing, it reflects very poorly on your disk space management skills if you have to do it to save space! Cleaning the browser cache can be done in your web browser's Preferences window (command-,).
Remove disk space hogs
Delete data that you don't need, or move them to an external hard disk, CDs or DVDs.
Run maintenance utilities
Free system maintenance utilities like EaseUS CleanGenius can help clean up Mac temporary files, system caches and logs. This should also be considered more as a maintenance task than a disk space saving the task. EaseUS CleanGenius is a powerful and easy-to-use cleanup software for Apple Mac users, making your Apple Mac system run faster and free up hard drive space by cleaning up the System Caches, User Caches, System Logs, User Logs, User Downloads, Trash, and Safari Internet Cache, etc. CleanGenius allows enjoying smooth & better system performance with such vital features as Clean up System junk, Clean Caches, Free Space Monitor, Quick Browse Device Files, and so on. All the operations are done within minutes and with less system resource being occupied during the whole process. With EaseUS CleanGenius, you can manage routine tasks and keep your Mac clean, efficient in the simplest way.
Highlighted features of EaseUS CleanGenius
Clean up Mac fast: You can free more space on your Mac disk keeping your Mac healthy at all times. With a simple click from the utility, all junk files (System Caches, User Caches, System Logs, User Logs, User Downloads, Trash, Safari Internet Cache and more) will be removed in just a matter of seconds.
Monitor disk space: It will show you the disk space available and will alert you in advance if the disk space is already running low. You can clean or move files to free up disk space to ensure that your Mac is running smoothly.
Disk Ejector: Using this one will allow you to eject the mounted drives, such as external storage disks, CD and DVD disks, SuperDrive, network storage and disk images.
Browser Plug-ins Cleanup: Support to clean up and remove browsers such as Safari, Chrome or Firefox plugins, cache, and cookies. Your browsing histories, bookmarks and downloaded files won't be cleaned.
Mac Uninstaller: 'Uninstall Applications' safely and completely remove applications and their components, preferences, log files, etc. Select an application, just one click, the application and its additional components will be removed.
Duplicates Finder: Duplicate files have the identical contents and waste the precious disk space. CleanGenius can easily find and remove duplicate files to reclaim the wasted disk space.
Disk Usage: Visualize the size of your files & folders and remove the unwanted large files to free up more disk space.
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Free Memory: When the free memory of your Mac is insufficient, you can easily use CleanGenius to free memory and speed up your Mac for better performance.
Clean Mac Hard Drive Free Software
Set Login Items: Unneeded applications may auto run every time when you start Mac. This will reduce your Mac performance. If you don't want an application to start every time you launch your Mac, just open CleanGenius and disable the startup items you find annoying.