Software  When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

BleachBit 3.1.1484 Beta

BleachBit

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)

BleachBit 3.1.1484 Beta changes:

For a list of changes see the commit log and GitHub bug tracker.

Tests

These tests are for both Windows and Linux.

  • Start the GUI. The toolbar should have text and larger icons.
  • Clean Google Chrome history, and verify there is no OperationalError error message.
  • In the Google Chrome profile directory, delete or rename the History file. Then, use BleachBit to clean Google Chrome history. There should be no error message.
  • If you do not use VIM, verify it is automatically hidden from the list of cleaners.
  • Copy information to the system clipboard. Use BleachBit to clean the system clipboard. Verify it is empty by pasting from the clipboard.

Windows

  • Verify the installer works.
  • Start the GUI. Minimize and maximize it. Move it between monitors. Verify the BleachBit GUI does not disappear.
  • Start the application, and you should not get a popup error "There is no disk in the drive."
  • Check the box for Windows Explorer - Shellbags, and it should give you a helpful warning.
  • Run the Internet Explorer cleaner, and verify it does not delete audio mixer settings.
  • Put a junction in the recycle bin, and verify BleachBit does not follow it. See #668.

Linux

  • Test new distributions: Fedora 30, Fedora 31.
  • Install from .rpm, and it should require the package python-gobject.
  • Install from .deb on Ubuntu 16.04, and it should not fail because the package python-scandir is not available.
  • Verify there is a launcher to start BleachBit.
  • Run BleachBit in CLI mode where an X session is not available.
  • Verify there are translations on RHEL and CentOS.
  • Preview the VIM swap cleaners, and verify it does not list ~/.htpasswd . This assumes you had that file or made it for testing.
  • Clean the DNF package manager.

After testing

If something is broken, please file a bug report. If it works well, please post a comment with what you tested in the testing forum.

Download: BleachBit 3.1 Beta | 11.4 MB (Open Source)
Download: Portable BleachBit 3.1 Beta | 12.1 MB
View: BleachBit Home page

Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware

Report a problem with article
Next Article

Thunderbird 68.4.2

Previous Article

Debotnet 0.3.0

Join the conversation!

Login or Sign Up to read and post a comment.

17 Comments - Add comment