There are quite a lot of mac cleaning tools out there at the moment. The competition is big, and almost every software developer tries to add more unique features to their app or combine different kinds of tools to make their product more comprehensive. Drive Genius 5 also combines two big types of tools for a safe and fast Mac work – it offers both cleaning set of tools and protection from malware and viruses.
Prosoft Drive Genius – The Cleaning Part
In all, if you download Drive Genius 5 (or upgrade from earlier versions), you can explore through 3 Modules – Protect, Speed Up and Clean Up. We’ll talk about the Protect one a bit later; for now, let’s focus on the cleaning and speeding parts.
The Speed Up module offers you two features:
- Defragment – you can learn more about this process here. (The feature is not available on macOS High Sierra (10.13) or higher)
- Speed tab claims to measure your optimal drive performance.
The Clean Up module has 8 different tools to try. Here is a short sum up on each of them.
Combo Cleaner is an antivirus and system optimizer created by a company called RCS LT.This application runs on Mac computers and works with all recent Mac operating systems, including Yosemite, El Capitan, and Sierra. The best Mac Cleaner software helps you to do this without iCloud. You do not have to spend additional money if you can locate free space in your Mac itself. Other reasons why you need to consider Mac cleaner software includes the removal of GBs application data that is not often used.
- Repartition – Repartition – this feature shows you all of your Mac partitions and offers you to organize or delete them in order to optimize the space. (The feature is not available on macOS High Sierra (10.13) or higher)
- Find Duplicates – this tool looks for identical files that may clutter your system.
- Find Large Files – this is a useful feature that allows you locating all the big files on your Mac. Good chances are that you don’t need many of them.
- Clone– this feature figures out the configuration of your drive and copies it to the new drive.
- Secure Erase deletes the data with no possibility of recovery.
- Initialize– this one works with preparation of new drives or deleting the old ones (can be used to prepare a drive for work with Windows or different camera cards).
- IconGenius™ – here you can choose an icon for any folder or drive.
- Information– this tab gathers all of the information you may need to find on your Mac’s system.
Drive Genius for Mac – The Protecting Part
Macs have always had the reputation of well secured devices that do not need any additional antivirus programs. However, such programs (free or paid) for OSX do exist and people do install them. It is not surprising, as you can only be amazed by the skills of modern hackers and the number of nowadays scams and viruses that potentially can affect Macs, too.
The fact that there have been a considerable amount of viruses and security issues only tells us that some kind of protection wouldn’t hurt. The last security flaw stroke not long ago, with the update to High Sierra. Maybe you didn’t notice it, as Apple was fast to fix it, but for some time, anyone could log in to your system without any passwords.
Drive Genius 5 claims to protect you from all the possible issues. By exploring the Protect module, you can see what features it offers.
- Malware Scan – when you run Malware Scan, it looks through all of your files in search for all the currently known malware. The list of such malware is updated on the daily basis. Additionally, this feature automatically looks for malware in all of your downloaded files.
- BootWell – this tool builds up an additional startup drive in order to optimize or fix you primary drive (needed for repair, defragment, advanced physical check, etc.)
- Physical Check – this feature aims to check and fix different hardware issues connected to damaged drive and cable or connection problems.
- Instant DrivePulse – it performs basic DrivePulse operations and tells you if there are problems.
- Active files – this feature shows you files and programs that are active at the moment.
- Consistency Check – this one looks through formatted drives and makes sure there are no errors and data issues.
- Repair – this tool is able to fix the majority of logical file problems.
- Rebuild – this feature can find the lost file names if the data is not removed.
The Pricing
The program offers a free demo. The download link is provided by email with a unique demo key. With the demo up and running you can test out available features for up to 30 days. Drive Genius 5 app is not free and requires a one-time payment. There are three plans you can choose from.
- Standard - $79
- Standard With BootWell© Drive - $94
- Professional - $299 (annual fee)
How to Uninstall Drive Genius
There are quite a lot of inquiries on Mac forums from people who have problems uninstalling Drive Genius. If you decide to remove this app, too, here are your options.
First option is to do it manually. First of all, stop all the processes of Drive Genius (with the help of Cmd+opt +Esc; choose Drive Genius and click on Force Quite). Then, drag-and-drop the app to Trash and confirm uninstalling. Then it is recommended to go through your files and to manually delete all the data associated with Drive Genius. Be sure you delete the following, if they are still there:
- - /Users/Library/Preferences/com.prosofteng.DriveGenius2.plist
- - /Users/Library/Application Support/DriveGenius
- - /Users/Library/Preferences/com.prosofteng.DGAgent.plist
Second option is to use a special app. This option is much faster and easier. All you need to do is to use a cleaning app with an uninstalling feature. MacFly Pro can handle it very quickly for you.
Conclusion
Drive Genius 5 is a great tool for managing Mac’s hard drive and its partitions. The set of provided features is rich but very narrow and you will yourself rarely using them on the regular. App’s design feels outdated and even confusing at times which can be a deal-breaker for some. If you don’t mind spending money on such a tool, it is a decent choice. It is recommended to check out the demo version before you make up your mind.
In my opinion, only about 20 percent of an app’s features should be considered premium features that users should have to pay for. However, In most cases, users really only need the other 80 percent of features which should be free. But, to get those useful 80 percent of features, users have to dig into their pockets and pay for the 20 percent of features they don’t really need.
For CleanMyMac, a disk cleaner, which part is the 80 percent you should have gotten for free? Is there an app that provides that 80 percent?
Of course, there is. I’d like to recommend Trend Micro’s Dr. Cleaner, a free app that’s comparable with CleanMyMac.
Let’s see what functions CleanMyMac provides to its subscribers that Dr. Cleaner also provides, while pointing out features in CleanMyMac that might create problems or aren’t that necessary for the average user.
1. System Junk
“System” as defined by CleanMyMac includes user cache files, system log files, as well as the application language packs. The latest version of Dr. Cleaner supports the cleanup of user cache and system files, but stops at removing application language packs due to safety considerations: for certain software, there might be program errors once the language pack is removed. Moreover, a single language pack is very small and does not significantly affect the entire disk space
2. Photo Junk
When iPhoto users synchronize their phone camera with the computer terminal, it creates residual cache files that speed up photo browsing for the user, but also increases the burden on disk by using up space.
We can say that this kind of space consumption is a double-edged sword, since browsing is speeded up. But for infrequent iPhoto users, this feature is somewhat superfluous. You get this feature as one of CleanMyMac’s value-added services, while Dr. Cleaner merges this function into the iTunes cache-cleaning function, because this function is too simple to separate out for display.
3. Mail Attachments
When using the Mail app on the Mac, you can accumulate a lot of attachments over time. As you can see, these attachments are located in CleanMyMac, but did you know there is a risk when cleaning mail attachments? Once you have removed a mail attachment and are unable to sync to your mail server, you cannot get them back. In Dr. Cleaner, we designed mail caches into the Junk Files feature which does not affect your mail attachments.
4. Large Files
Large file scanning is a very useful feature. Users tend to ignore what they have downloaded, such as large software installation packages or movies. These large files can account for half of the disposable space of the disk. This function can indeed become a paid-for function, as it is with CleanMyMac, but in exchange for the support of its users, Dr. Cleaner provides this valuable function for free. With Dr. Cleaner, you can also lock some files that you don’t want to remove in case you want to make sure you do not delete important files.
5. Disk Map
We think it is user-friendly to help you manage all the files on your hard disk using a visual map, so we added the Disk Map feature into Dr. Cleaner for free. However, no functions like this can be found in CleanMyMac.
Disk Map quickly scans your drive and builds an amazing visualization of all the files and folders on your computer, allowing you to easily navigate the system and find the content that takes up the most space.
In addition, all folders and files under the home folder are listed out by size. As for some system-required critical files, deleting them would provide a prompt that those are important and are not allowed to be removed. With the Disk Map feature you can also find out when a file or folder was created, modified or last opened. Furthermore, hovering your mouse on one folder then clicking the magnifier icon will direct you to the file location.
Conclusion
Is Dr. Cleaner worth trying? Absolutely, yes! Don’t hesitate. It not only cleans up your disk space but also solves other Mac issues you might have. In addition, we are also the least expensive cleaning app on macOS. If you still cannot afford it, you can call your friends or family to share the cost. Thanks Apple for letting us share wonderful applications together via family sharing. Regardless if you are new to the Mac or an advanced user, Dr. Cleaner will be a good choice for you. While Dr. Cleaner can help you free up a lot of space, please don’t forget to back up your important files, in case an unfortunate event happens like your hard disk malfunctions. We regard customers’ data security as the most important thing. I hope you will have fun with Dr. Cleaner in the future!
Waiting for You
Thanks for taking the time to read my article. How do you like Dr. Cleaner? Do you have any other questions or suggestions? We are trying our best to meet more needs of our users. Leave your comments here. We are always happy to hear from you.