Dr. Cleaner erases RapidWeaver Images

RapidWeaver Classic
3

So many of of these cleaning apps do terrible things. I’ve heard countless stories like this. I’m so sorry. So glad to hear you were well backed up. Kudos to you for that diligence.

For anyone considering these sorts of utility apps here’s the recommendation from the guy that writes Stacks (me) and has to help people clean up the mess that these apps often create:

  1. Make reliable and well tested backups before running these types of apps.

    I’ve heard countless horror stories of lost data, corrupted data, and destroyed systems. The scariest part is that the changes are sometimes insidious – if you didn’t regularly work on this site then it could have been weeks before you noticed. Some people only keep recent backups and that means… :grimacing: …lost data.

  2. Whenever running these types of apps run them with NOTHING else running.

    Even quit utility apps like dropbox and menu bar apps. The reasons is that many of these apps “Clean Up” the caches folder. The caches folder is often used by running apps and is assumed to be totally stable – this is the case for Stacks. Stacks stores all its intermediate data in the caches folder. Stacks will try to fall back to the original image locations and the last saved data – but if those have also been cleaned up or moved… :worried: … then that’s it. These apps probably don’t delete the images out of your files – I don’t know what happened exactly, but if I had to place bet, I’d bet that one of these files was still open on your computer when the Caches folder was “cleaned”.

  3. Never use these apps.

    OK, that’s a pretty strong opinion. I know. But hear me out…

    Some of the cleaning apps are pretty good – CleanMyMac by MacPaw gets consistently great reviews and the MacPaw guys are :+1: :+1:

    But many of these apps perform lots of “magic” – moving, deleting, and changing a vast number of things on your computer that they assume are not being used anymore. As you’ve proven – sometimes these assumptions are bad ones.

    Ostensibly these apps are used for “performance”, but I suspect the real practical benefits of running these apps often slim to none. If you’re running out of hard drive space then often a new SSD is not too dear and brings a vast performance improvement over a spinning drive.

    There are a ton of other great ways to eek out a bit more performance from an older machine (I write Stacks on a slightly dented 2010 Mac Pro that I bought second hand for about ¼ it’s original price – but it’s quite fast after some strategic upgrades) – I’d recommend trying just about anything before using these sorts of apps.

    Lastly, and for what it’s worth: I don’t use these apps myself and never will.


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