How To Clear Cache Folders On Your Mac

I had never bothered to clear my computer cache on my Mac.

It’s funny because I have routinely cleared the “temp” and “prefetch” folders on my PC but never thought I needed to do it on the Mac.

For some illogical reason, I thought the Mac was immune from basic maintenance. Duh…not the case.

So I went to the Mac Store and asked how to clear the cache on my iMac.

The greeter passed me on to a floor person who went to the Apple archives and gave me the info.

So here’s how to clear your cache on a mac.

Go to the finder. Select Go To Folder and type in ~/library/caches.

Hit return and presto, you are now looking at the cache folder for the machine.

In my case I had over 5800 items in there. Folders, files, all sorts of stuff.

I did a Select All from the edit tab of the Finder Nav  menu and then selected “Go To Trash” from the Action Tab in the Folder menu.

Once everything was cleared I had one more cache folder to find.

I went to the Hard Drive icon in the Finder sidebar, clicked it and opened the Library folder.

In the Library folder I found a Cache folder and opened it.

I did a Select All, move to trash and now I had all the stuff I needed to empty.

I then hit the Command key and right clicked empty trash to get a “secured empty trash” message.

I clicked the tab and emptied the trash bin.

Now in some cases you may not delete a file if it is in use. So you may have to shut down the Mac, reboot and then finish off the clear empty trash on the reboot.

So there you have it. Hope this information helps.

As always, don’t forget to “Google+”,”Like”,”Pin”,Stumble”,”Tweet” the post if you found this useful. Thanks for the support.

The transcript for the video follows below.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

Read on for the transcript

Hi. Claude Pelanne here, Affiliate Starting Line. Welcome. This is going to

be a video on how to clear your cache on a Mac. I had to do it because I

had never done it, and it turns out I had about 5,700 files to clear. It

makes your machine work more efficiently, it gets all the dead files out,

that have been temporary files that you don’t need. How do you do it?

On a Mac you go to your Finder and if you see the finder menu here, you go

to Go, and you come down to Go To Folder, and you’re looking for the cache

folder. You type in the following code: ~, which is a key that you’ll find

on the upper left-hand corner of your keyboard, /library/cashes; that sends

you to the main cache folder of your machine. Click Go; it’ll send you

directly there.

Then what you really want to do is I want to select all. I’m going to come

over here to Edit, Select All, and then I’m going to come over here to the

Action tab and I’m going to move it all to the trash. I’ve just emptied the

main folder, cache of stuff. When I originally did this, there were 5,700

files in there. You only need to do it maybe every once a week, every

couple of weeks.

There’s another library folder, and it’s in the Macintosh, on your main

drive. You go to Main Drive, come up here to Library, open that up. You’re

going to see Cache here, open that up, and then again, you can do a select

all, and come over here and move to trash. This one’s asking for . . . What

may happen by the way, is I’m going to delete. What you do is you hit the

Command key, then Trash, then I right-click it, and then hit Secure Empty

Trash; it’ll ask you to do it again, you do it. Then it’s going to clear

everything from both. It’s clearing 722 files here. That’s how you clear

the cache on your Mac.

In some of the operating . . . I’m operating on Lion, and there used to be

under your main directory, in your name in your Mac, in this case it would

be this one here; my name, another library file here, but it’s no longer

here. I’m assuming that when I upgraded to Lion that changed the

configuration of the way things work. The only places that you have to go

are your main hard drive. As I showed you here, you go to ~/Library, etc.

It looks like it’s cleared some, not all. If it doesn’t clear all the files

that means you have some stuff you’re using. What you do is you shut down

your machine and you open it; when you come and boot it back up again, it

will . . . let me see what happened here. Yeah, it’s giving me this ‘Can’t

be . . .’ I’m using a data file, so what I’m going to do is shut the

machine down, when I reopen it, I’ll be able to go in and clear the rest of

the files in there.

That’s it, that’s how you clear cache on a Mac. This is Claude Pelanne,

Affiliate Starting Line. Hope this helps. Stay with it, stay well, and

we’ll talk soon.

About Claude Pelanne

Claude Pelanne is an internet marketer and consultant who comes out of television broadcast. He works with start ups and small business to optimize their online business.