When your computer is getting full, BleachBit quickly frees disk space. When your information is only your business, BleachBit guards your privacy. With BleachBit you can free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there.
Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean thousands of applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, and more. Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster. Better than free, BleachBit is open source.
BleachBit has many useful features:
- Delete your private files so completely that "even God can't read them" according to South Carolina Representative Trey Gowdy.
- Simple operation: read the descriptions, check the boxes you want, click preview, and click delete.
- Multi-platform: Linux and Windows
- Free of charge and no money trail
- Free to share, learn, and modify (open source)
- No adware, spyware, malware, browser toolbars, or "value-added software"
- Translated to 64 languages besides American English
- Shred files to hide their contents and prevent data recovery
- Shred any file (such as a spreadsheet on your desktop)
- Overwrite free disk space to hide previously deleted files
- Portable app for Windows: run without installation
- Command line interface for scripting and automation
- CleanerML allows anyone to write a new cleaner using XML
- Automatically import and update winapp2.ini cleaner files (a separate download) giving Windows users access to 2500+ additional cleaners
- Frequent software updates with new features
Going beyond standard deletion of files, BleachBit has several advanced cleaners:
- Clear the memory and swap on Linux
- Delete broken shortcuts on Linux
- Delete the Firefox URL history without deleting the whole file—with optional shredding
- Delete Linux localizations: delete languages you don't use. More powerful than localepurge and available on more Linux distributions.
- Clean APT for Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Linux Mint
- Find widely-scattered junk such as Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files.
- Execute yum clean for CentOS, Fedora, and Red Hat to remove cached package data
- Delete Windows registry keys—often where MRU (most recently used) lists are stored
- Delete the OpenOffice.org recent documents list without deleting the whole Common.xcu file
- Overwrite free disk space to hide previously files
- Vacuum Firefox, Google Chrome, Liferea, Thunderbird, and Yum databases: shrink files without removing data to save space and improve speed
- Surgically remove private information from .ini and JSON configuration files and SQLite3 databases without deleting the whole file
- Overwrite data in SQLite3 before deleting it to prevent recovery (optional)
Changes:
- For a list of changes see the commit log and GitHub bug tracker.
Tests
Please test the application in general with special attention to the following tests.
These tests are for both Windows and Linux:
- On the main BleachBit window, verify that using the mouse on the left vertical slider (next to the checkboxes) allows you to scroll to the bottom. To scoll, try both left clicking and the mouse wheel (issue 1179).
- Verify that right clicking a cleaning option works using the text described at the top of issue 1201.
- Open Brave, Chromium, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Opera, visit a site, and create a site setting. To see site settings in Google Chrome, click the lock icon to the left of the page address. Then in BleachBit, choose the new site preferences option, and then verify in the browser that the settings were reset.
Windows
- In the Windows control panel, uninstall BleachBit. Delete the folder %localappdata%\fontconfig, if it exists. Install the new installer, and after it is done and before starting the application, verify the folder exists. Delete the folder and start the application. Verify there is a splash screen that appears while the folder is being created, which usually last roughly 20 to 60 seconds. Restart the application, and verify the startup is much faster because it used the font cache from the previous start.
- In the Windows control panel, uninstall BleachBit. Download the installer, and run it like BleachBit-4.4.1-setup.exe /S /NoDesktopShortcut. Verify the installation takes place silently without user interaction or user feedback. Verify no shortcut is placed on the desktop. Then, repeat this test but use different capitalization and order for /S /NoDesktopShortcut and it should still work. For example, use /nodesktopshortcut /S.
- After installation, verify in the Windows start menu that there is not a shortcut to the installer (issue 1244).
- Click the application menu (top left corner) and choose the option to shred a folder. Verify the folder selection dialog allows you to paste the folder name. Also, verify the deletion is successful. (Use only on a folder that is safe to destroy.)
- In BleachBit preferences, enable the Winapp2.ini option. Verify that among the list of cleaners there are section groups named Internet Explorer, Vivaldi, and Brave (assuming those are installed) instead of numeric codes 3001, 3033, and 3034.
- Verify the Winapp2.ini exclusion is honored as described at the top of issue 1247. Create a file called update-config.json, if it does not aleady exist, in a folder matching the pattern %CommonAppData%\Mozilla\updates\*\. The contents do not matter, and the file can be empty. Run preview or clean for option Firefox/Mozilla: Updates, and verify the file is not matched.
- Under a folder matching the pattern %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Edge*\User Data\*, create files called LOG, LOG.old, and ALOG. The contents do not matter, and they can be empty. Enable the Winapp2.ini option in the preferences, and run the cleaner called Microsoft Edge. Verify the first two files are found by either preview or delete, but the third file should not match.
- Shred a file using the Windows shell integration as described at the top of issue 1227.
Download: BleachBit 4.4.1 | 11.6 MB (Open Source)
Download: Portable BleachBit 4.4.1 | 12.3 MB
View: BleachBit Home page
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