CleanMyDrive 2 F.A.Q.

Since October 2023, MacPaw stops developing and maintaining CleanMyDrive 2 as a standalone app, and it will not be available on the App Store. However, you can find all features of CleanMyDrive 2 in the CleanMyMac X Menu, and we will continue to develop these features in the future.

The External Drives functionality and other features in the CleanMyMac X Menu are always free, even after the end of a trial period in CleanMyMac X. You can get CleanMyMac X from our website or on the App Store.

Why MacPaw stops developing CleanMyDrive 2

Since 2023, you can remove junk from external drives not only with CleanMyDrive 2 but also using the CleanMyMac X Menu. We decided not to duplicate the feature in 2 apps but leave it in one place — CleanMyMac X. Thus, we can save efforts and concentrate more on the cleanup feature itself, giving you a better experience.

Moreover, once we cease to maintain CleanMyDrive 2 as a standalone app, we’ll have more resources for other great products besides CleanMyMac X — Setapp, ClearVPN, Moonlock, Gemini 2 and Gemini Photos, The Unarchiver, and others.

What it means for users that CleanMyDrive 2 is no longer developedCleanMyDrive 2 will not be available on the App Store

If you haven’t downloaded the app before, there will be no way to get it. Still, you may find all features of CleanMyDrive 2 in the CleanMyMac X Menu (read more in this section).

If you already have CleanMyDrive, it remains perfectly safe to use

For people who installed the app before, it will remain fully stable, functional, and secure. The App Store will not withdraw CleanMyDrive 2 from your Mac.

These are the system requirements for CleanMyDrive 2:

- macOS 10.13 and newer, including macOS 14 Sonoma- Both Intel and Apple silicon processors- 35 MB of space on your hard drive

We can’t guarantee that CleanMyDrive 2 will always work flawlessly on older systems. Apple only fully supports its latest operating system and 2 versions before it. When a new OS is released, yet another older system stops receiving functional and security updates. Without security updates, all apps, including CleanMyDrive 2, might be at risk from hackers. And, like other apps on unsupported systems, CleanMyDrive 2 may work slowly or even stop unexpectedly, and we may not be able to help.

CleanMyDrive 2 may also run slower and less reliably on systems that will follow macOS 14 Sonoma because the app won’t receive updates or fixes. That is why we recommend switching to CleanMyMac X, which is always supported on the latest operating systems.

Customer support is still available

The FAQ for CleanMyDrive 2 will remain online, and our Support Team will be happy to answer all your questions and requests.

How to work with external drives using the CleanMyMac X Menu

When you connect external drives to your Mac, here’s what the CleanMyMac X Menu can do:

- Scan and clean up a drive from junk- Review folders and files on a drive using the Space Lens module of CleanMyMac X- Safely eject a drive

Ready to try CleanMyMac X? Great! Then, here’s how to install it, and here’s how to work with Connected devices and external drives.

CleanMyMac X is a paid app. How can I use it for free with external drives?

You may clean up junk from external drives using the CleanMyMac X Menu at any time without limitation, even after the end of a trial period. It’s true that when you don’t have a paid plan, most modules of CleanMyMac X are blocked, as well as some monitors in its Menu. But the cleanup for external drives, unlike other features, works in all cases.

You may want to read about all features of the CleanMyMac X Menu and about the free trial period.

I used CleanMyDrive 2; can I have a discount for CleanMyMac X?

No. Since CleanMyDrive 2 was a free app, we don’t provide discounts on other MacPaw products.

But if you previously purchased any app from MacPaw, you may receive a 30% discount on your next purchase.

With CleanMyDrive 2 you can:

• Save files directly to any drive by dragging-and-dropping that file into CleanMyDrive 2
• Customize your USB icons for easy identification and to give them a personal touch
• Have your drives automatically ejected when your Mac goes to sleep
• Hide the disks you don’t need right now from the list

CleanMyDrive 2 can only clean up unnecessary files (junk) from external drives which you connect to your computer. Whereas CleanMyMac X is a much stronger tool that allows you to clean up, monitor, maintain, and protect your entire Mac.

To get started with CleanMyDrive 2, just click its icon in the menu bar and open the app. Here all of your drives (both internal and external) will be displayed, and you can see what your space is being used for and how much free space is left. 

Cleaning a drive is as simple as plugging it into your USB port, opening CleanMyDrive 2 from your menu bar, and hitting Clean next to that drive’s icon (please note that internal drives can be monitored with CleanMyDrive 2, but not cleaned).

CleanMyDrive 2 is an external drive manager, but it also displays the status of your internal drives. In order to do this, CleanMyDrive 2 asks for permissions, so it can access important information about your drives and display it in the app. By granting CleanMyDrive 2 these permissions, you are allowing it to show you how much space is on the drive, how much space you have left, what type of content you have on your drive, and other useful information.

With CleanMyDrive 2, you can maintain your removable drives by using its built-in, automated cleanup feature. To enable it, insert your drive, click on the Settings icon to the left of your drive’s icon in CleanMyDrive 2, and turn on the Automatic cleanup switch.

Yes, absolutely. 

CleanMyDrive only monitors the space on your removable drives and cleans them from:

- service junk (such files as .DS_Store, .Spotlight, Thumbs.db, Resource forks and other useless system-generated data)- trashed files (files that are simply removed and appear in the drive's local Trash). 

That means CleanMyDrive 2 is completely safe to use.

The Eject All command unmounts all of your mounted drives at once. If you close your MacBook or put your Mac into sleep mode after using the Eject All command, you will be able to eject any of your drives with the assurance that they won't be corrupted.

CleanMyDrive can clean USB flash drives, SD cards, external hard drives. If you wish to clean internal drives as well, you should check out our all-in-one Mac cleaning app called CleanMyMac X.

Yes, it does, however, your network drives do not need to be cleaned. The reason? When you delete things from your network drive, your Mac takes care of the trashed items. The benefit of having CleanMyDrive for network drives is that it makes ejecting drives faster. But again, network drives do not collect or store trash, so cleaning them is basically unnecessary.

CleanMyDrive shows your Time Machine drive in its main menu but does not clean it. This is due to the fact that cleaning your Time Machine drive may corrupt Time Machine backups located on the drive even if you aren't performing any actions with the backups.

No, CleanMyDrive does not monitor your drives unless it’s running (make sure you see CleanMyDrive’s icon in the menu bar). However, you can have CleanMyDrive launch automatically on startup by enabling this in CleanMyDrive’s Preferences.

CleanMyDrive 2 erases useless files completely, to the point where they cannot be restored.

This happens because service junk is being generated by the system every time you insert your removable drive into your Mac (or PC). This is why we suggest you clean your drive every time you unmount it.