Searching useless preferences/caches

[chevy]

I am looking for all preferences and caches that are not linked to the applications I have installed on my Mac, I want to erase all that unnecessary crap. Is there any tool to help me for that purpose ? I tried Spring Cleaning, but it doesn't have this feature.

Any hint ?

[Giaguara]

Preferences and caches get created when something gets used the first time. So if something isn't used, there will be no cache for it. If something is never ever used, you might delete it (excluding anything in Utilities...)

What would make sense for removing all the junk is remove all unneeded localizations and if pre-10.6, also the wrong architecture code. Those will shrink e.g. TextEdit from 30 MB to 2 MB. So that cleaning will clean a few GB of space on an average system.

The rest of log file rotations, cache cleaning etc can be done with OnyX.
Or run periodic daily weekly monthly manually.

[chevy]

Thanx for your help Gia. But this is not exactly what I am looking for. I have a (long) history using Mac and upgrading from one OS to the next one. Today I have hundreds of preferences for old things that I don't use anymore (old Photoshop versions, old games, old utilities ...), most of these have names that I even don't know. I'd like to clean up my disk from all that crap, but I didn't find an easy way to make sure that I do not erase a preference that is linked to a software that is still installed on my Mac.

[nealt]

The programs PreferenceCleaner and Preferential Treatment may be able to help you. My experience is that if an application needs a preference file and it does not exist the application will create a new one.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

I thought that something like AppDelete would do this, but apparently not (or not quite exactly what you're looking for).

I think something that would get you 90% of the way there would be to simply open the Preferences folder (~/Library/Preferences), sort by date ascending, then take a peek at what's there. Any preference not associated with an app anymore won't be modified, so it's date won't change since the last time you used it.

[djackmac]

As far as caches are concerned you can pretty much delete the entire contents of the users/youruser/library/caches folder. Other than that I can't imagine your library folder being much larger than 1GB. I've successfully manually rebuilt many user accounts when Migration assistant failed by combing through the users library/preferences and only bringing across certain things that I saw relevant to recreate the user as close to what it was before and never had any complaints. Just like Gia said Onyx is a great tool for cleaning the system and user caches and preferences and also has a feature for combing through broken .plists. If you actually utilize everything Onyx offers I feel its really all that is needed unless you are having strange behaviors that Onyx for some reason isn't able to clean. Other than that I would do a safe boot from time to time do to the largely overlooked benefits of a safe boot in cleaning hidden caches.

[Satcomer]

I couldn't find any software that deleted old Preference files that the program was deleted. So I did it manually and it took time and at least a couple of days. I made a list of my programs and the name of the developer of said programs (by doing Get Infos and such ways) on a piece of paper. Then i looked in ~/Library/Application Support/ for anything that was still there that were abandoned. Taking care not to empty the Trash as I went in case I screwed up. Then I did the same for ~/Library/Preferences/ (comparing it all to the list i made earlier.

The important thing was not to delete the trash until i tested all my programs. After doing this (for a few days) I tested every program I have, sometime just launching to see if it still had its data. I did find I did screw up once and I was able to fix it with my cloned backup.

The whole time I have an external bootable clone in case I really screwed up. Then I bough the shareware program AppDelete after trying other delete programs and came to my own conclusion it was the cleanest uninstall programs that work almost perfectly. I now never just trow out a program and use AppDelete to deinstall programs exclusively.

I just trust myself then some third party programming about my Macs. The whole process was time consuming but it did work out well in the end. The important thing was the backup to relay on it in case of serious problem.

Note: I don't use many third party fonts so your mileage may very.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Just as a side-note before you embark on a journey that won't net you much improvement in anything:

Deleting old preference files and cache files will not gain you any worthwhile hard drive space back. Even if you had 100,000 applications' worth of old preference files, that may get you back 300 megabytes or so of space -- in other words, you wouldn't even notice. For a more reasonable amount of applications, I'd bet you'd see about 40MB of hard drive space freed. In 1994, that was a big thing to do a dance about. Nowadays, it's nothing to bat an eye at.

Deleting old preferences files and cache files will not gain you any worthwhile increase in speed, either. Those files are sitting there, idle, taking up minimal amounts of room and doing nothing to impact performance of your computer. Your computer will not perform a single percentage point better than it does now if you delete those files.

The one and only reason to go deleting old preference files is to keep a "tidy" hard drive (only in the mental sense, since the computer has no notion of a "tidy" nor "untidy" hard drive) -- in other words, peace of mind. I'm not discrediting this reason at all, nor am I saying it's any more or less important than anything else -- I'm simply saying that embarking on this endeavor will be for human reasons only... for peace of mind... for "tidiness"... for a cleaner mental "picture" of your hard drive.

Just my $0.02.