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anilakar 54 minutes ago [-]
For Windows users looking to save space, there's Compactor[1] that uses the NTFS built-in compression opportunistically for only those files that benefit from it. It is not a deduplicator but the basic idea is the same: take an underutilized OS feature and make it usable.
Pretty handy when your flight sim game takes 1.2 terabytes with most of that being sparse terrain mesh data and uncompressed textures. Compressing the whole directory would take over a day according to Microsoft and their infamous progress bar; Compactor gets it done in fifteen minutes.
It's quite the dark-pattern to allow you to download it and scan for free, without any clear indication that it's a paid product, and then ambush you with a purchase dangling the space savings in front of your face.
guywithabike 2 hours ago [-]
If anything, it's the opposite of a dark pattern: you get to see if it'll provide any value for you without paying a dime. It's a far better proposition than paying up only to find out that it won't free up any space for you. The linked site is very clear about how the pricing works.
sssilver 2 hours ago [-]
This would only be true if it didn't take your time before asking you to pay to not waste the time that it took.
runjake 1 hours ago [-]
It says it’s a paid app right on the linked page.
alsetmusic 2 hours ago [-]
The app store identifies apps with paid features. You shouldn't be entirely surprised.
Analemma_ 2 hours ago [-]
You are complaining that it can’t instantaneously perform a complete scan of your disk, and then attributing malicious intent to this lack of magic instant scanning technology.
What are we even doing here. The knee-jerk conspiratorial foolishness on this site is completely off the deep end.
sssilver 47 minutes ago [-]
No, I'm complaining that it doesn't ask me to pay before it takes my time to perform a complete scan of my disk (ideally before it even gives me a download of the app).
We both know it does so intentionally, and we also know exactly what the intent is.
drdeca 34 minutes ago [-]
Wouldn’t the ideal be that it informs you up front that it requires payment to get the benefit, but allows you to scan to estimate the benefit before deciding whether to pay (but after acknowledging that getting the benefit requires payment)?
boxed 19 minutes ago [-]
No we don't know this. And in fact you can listen to the Accidental Tech Podcast at length to hear him thinking through the current design at length.
runjake 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t understand. It mentions multiple times it’s not free right on the linked page. And if you open the App Store link? It also mentions it’s a paid app.
What am I missing?
greenpizza13 2 hours ago [-]
It's a couple Q's in on the page:
Q: How do I pay for Hyperspace?
Hyperspace is a free download in the Mac App Store. Once downloaded, it’s free to scan an unlimited number of files. Scanning will let you know how much space is eligible to be reclaimed.
If you decide you want to reclaim that space, you will need to pay for Hyperspace using the purchase button that appears after a successful scan or by selecting “Purchase Hyperspace…” from the “Hyperspace” menu in the menu bar.
alexjurkiewicz 1 hours ago [-]
It's four pages below the fold. The fact this is a paid tool is deliberately obscured.
swiftcoder 41 minutes ago [-]
This is how basically all Mac software worked in my youth. Maybe we should return to the heady days of shareware
markn951 3 hours ago [-]
I think the record for most space saved by this utility in a single run is in the hundreds of TBs now. I’ll see if I can find the toot.
It's amazing that this is a product. In an earlier job we used to ask how to do this (discovery phase of deduplication) in the first interview screening. Once you have that list, it's straightforward to make a few syscalls that make it happen.
underyx 34 minutes ago [-]
What are they gonna think of next, productizing something as trivial as FTP?
a_t48 2 hours ago [-]
This uses reflinks, right? I've been experimenting with using reflinks under Linux to speed up layer extraction for Docker, it's great.
frizlab 19 minutes ago [-]
It uses APFS clones
odo1242 20 minutes ago [-]
Yep
dostick 24 minutes ago [-]
Surprised that app with Full Disk Access permission requirement is allowed to the App Store.
steve_taylor 3 hours ago [-]
How does this compare to diskDedupe, which has been around longer and is much cheaper?
rtolsma 23 minutes ago [-]
i asked claude to make this and in 15min had a working replica CLI
odo1242 22 minutes ago [-]
Or use jdupes
starkshift 2 hours ago [-]
Nice I was just thinking about this the other day! Given the memory supply issue today, I wonder how much of data in our data centers worldwide is essentially just copied data? I have a feeling that there is a ton of redundancy, much of it absolutely necessary, but much of it essentially not at all, and howmuc memory we can reclaim by culling copies
Are you deleting the others and creating a symlink to the original? How does this work exactly? I didn't get it from the FAQ section.
Does this mean that if the original is gone, all the file links will not be found?
_diyar 2 hours ago [-]
No, this uses a feature of the macOS file system. From the FAQ:
> Q: Are clone files the same thing as symbolic links or hard links?
> A: No. Symbolic links (“symlinks”) and hard links are ways to make two entries in the file system that share the same data. This might sound like the same thing as the space-saving clones used by Hyperspace, but there’s one important difference. With symlinks and hard links, a change to one of the files affects all the files.
> The space-saving clones made by Hyperspace are different. Changes to one clone file do not affect other files. Cloned files should look and behave exactly the same as they did before they were converted into clones.
deathanatos 1 hours ago [-]
It's a CoW (copy-on-write) file, it sounds like.
KingMob 57 minutes ago [-]
Yes, but it sounds like it's more fine-grained than just the file-level. So even if you change part of one copy, the remaining unchanged subpieces are still shared, iiuc.
ianmurrays 2 hours ago [-]
Here’s a lengthier explanation [1] but it’s basically an APFS feature.
Seems useful for s3 buckets. I suppose a script that watches for new objects, calculates its sha256 and stores that in a DB, then checks for duplicate hashes would be a fairly trivial task. Though s3 doesn’t support symbolic links so accounting would need to be handled by server side code.
AceJohnny2 1 hours ago [-]
While the idea of data-deduplication does apply everywhere, this specifically depends on the APFS CoW data feature, so it's not applicable outside of macOS (or APFS Volumes)
Pretty handy when your flight sim game takes 1.2 terabytes with most of that being sparse terrain mesh data and uncompressed textures. Compressing the whole directory would take over a day according to Microsoft and their infamous progress bar; Compactor gets it done in fifteen minutes.
[1] https://github.com/Freaky/Compactor
What are we even doing here. The knee-jerk conspiratorial foolishness on this site is completely off the deep end.
We both know it does so intentionally, and we also know exactly what the intent is.
What am I missing?
Q: How do I pay for Hyperspace? Hyperspace is a free download in the Mac App Store. Once downloaded, it’s free to scan an unlimited number of files. Scanning will let you know how much space is eligible to be reclaimed.
If you decide you want to reclaim that space, you will need to pay for Hyperspace using the purchase button that appears after a successful scan or by selecting “Purchase Hyperspace…” from the “Hyperspace” menu in the menu bar.
Edit: maybe a bit hyperbolic of me, looks like it was 3.94TB https://mastodon.social/@WTL/116710030179809319
Does this mean that if the original is gone, all the file links will not be found?
> Q: Are clone files the same thing as symbolic links or hard links?
> A: No. Symbolic links (“symlinks”) and hard links are ways to make two entries in the file system that share the same data. This might sound like the same thing as the space-saving clones used by Hyperspace, but there’s one important difference. With symlinks and hard links, a change to one of the files affects all the files.
> The space-saving clones made by Hyperspace are different. Changes to one clone file do not affect other files. Cloned files should look and behave exactly the same as they did before they were converted into clones.
[1]: https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#how-it-works
It might be better to keep an index of paths to checksums and use the checksum as object key in S3.
I'm not sure what you like to achieve but if you use restic with S3 as a backend you can achieve much better deduplicate and compression.