TUAW review: Sponge for Mac OS X

I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to accumulate junk on my Macs. I start off with a nice, fat, clean hard drive, and before you know it I'm starting to panic about running out of space.

Sponge, from Dare to be Creative Ltd., is a US$26 program designed to look for the space-wasters on your Mac and help you get rid of them cleanly. There are other applications that do the same thing, Smith Micro's Spring Cleaning being the primary example of this. I actually shied away from cleaner applications since an earlier version of Spring Cleaning did a little TOO good a job a few years ago and rendered a Mac unusable until I reloaded the OS.

So it was with a great deal of trepidation that I decided to use Sponge to try to clean up my MacBook Air. It's a first-generation model with an 80 GB hard drive, of which 74.1 GB are actually usable. Since I was down to 16 GB of space, I figured that a quick cleaning might be in order. Read on for more about Sponge.

Time to Sponge-clean my MacBook Air
Sponge is a very small application -- only 1.2 MB. After installing the app through a drag-and-drop to the applications folder, I fired it up and was met with a very sparse user interface:

There are three primary tabs in Sponge -- Remove Applications, Sweep Disk Hogs, and Find Duplicates. I started with Remove Applications, since I knew that there were probably a lot of review apps that I needed to dump. Sponge does a surprisingly thorough search, not only in the Applications folder but in other locations as well. After getting my full list of applications, I went through the alphabetized list and deleted those that I knew I'd probably never use again.

Sponge not only gets rid of the applications, but any plists or support files for those programs. The files can either be moved to the Trash, or deleted immediately. I chose to move them to the Trash, and had to restart my MacBook Air after running the Remove Applications portion of Sponge in order to properly delete files that were in use.

After restarting, I emptied the Trash again and found that I now had 18.7 GB available. That was an improvement, but nothing spectacular. My next move was to run the Sweep Disk Hogs portion of Sponge. This took much longer than Remove Applications.

The results were eye-opening. I had forgotten that I had built a Windows Vista virtual machine on this Mac, and sure enough that was swallowing a huge 18.4 GB of my precious hard drive space. While I occasionally need to run virtual machines, I really didn't need to take up that much space for a VM that I rarely use. I decided to move the virtual machine file from the MacBook Air's hard drive to my portable backup drive, cleaning up a whopping 18.4 GB of space.

Since Sponge highlights the disk hogs by color (red indicates the most disk usage), it was simple to move through the various folders and see what was taking up space. Clearing out some caches and log files freed up another .5 GB, while running Remove Applications again pointed out how removing two seldom-used programs (Adobe Acrobat Professional and Bento) would give me back another 1.2 GB of space.

The last function, Remove Duplicates, looks for duplicate documents or files in any directory you choose. While I did have some duplicates, trashing them only freed up about another 100 MB. Remove Duplicates provides a side-by-side comparison of the files that are dupes, giving you an idea of where the files are and their creation and modification dates. Removing a duplicate file requires just one click from the Sponge interface.

The FInal Word
By the time all was said and done, I had recovered enough space to get to almost half-capacity on my drive -- I was up to 38.16 GB. Not bad. But could I have done the same without Sponge or one of the other cleaning applications? Absolutely.

If I had spent some time looking through my documents folder, I probably would have noticed the huge virtual machine file and decided that it was time for it to go. Likewise, browsing the file sizes in my Applications folder would have pointed out those programs like Adobe Acrobat Professional and Bento that I rarely used on my MacBook Air. For more experienced Mac users, I'm not sure I'd recommend Sponge or any other similar application.

On the other hand, Sponge was easy to use, fast, and quickly showed me exactly how much space I would recover by removing certain files. The application removal function made it simple to delete all of the Adobe Acrobat files with one click, although they were scattered.

The main competition for Sponge, Spring Cleaning, seems to be much more complete. It can take files that you may not want to delete and compress them into disk images for storage on an external drive. Spring Cleaning also provides regularly scheduled dumps of certain files. However, it's also nearly twice the price at US$49.99.

There's another possibility for those who are running into a space crunch on their Macs; just buy an external hard drive. A quick look around shows that 1 TB external hard drives are selling for as low as $100, so just moving some of those excess files to a new location might be a better idea than eliminating them altogether.

What software do you use to do your file cleanups, or do you simply keep moving files to a larger hard drive? Let us know by leaving a comment.