Hyperspace

sswyx about 4 hours ago 25 commentsRead Article on hypercritical.co

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anilakar•9 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.

[1] https://github.com/Freaky/Compactor

oersted•about 2 hours ago

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•about 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•about 1 hour 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•38 minutes ago

It says it’s a paid app right on the linked page.

Analemma_•about 1 hour 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.

alsetmusic•about 1 hour ago

The app store identifies apps with paid features. You shouldn't be entirely surprised.

runjake•39 minutes 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•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour ago

It's four pages below the fold. The fact this is a paid tool is deliberately obscured.

markn951•about 2 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.

Edit: maybe a bit hyperbolic of me, looks like it was 3.94TB https://mastodon.social/@WTL/116710030179809319

a_t48•about 1 hour ago

This uses reflinks, right? I've been experimenting with using reflinks under Linux to speed up layer extraction for Docker, it's great.

steve_taylor•about 2 hours ago

How does this compare to diskDedupe, which has been around longer and is much cheaper?

starkshift•about 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

system2•about 1 hour ago

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•about 1 hour 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•34 minutes ago

It's a CoW (copy-on-write) file, it sounds like.

KingMob•12 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•about 1 hour ago

Here’s a lengthier explanation [1] but it’s basically an APFS feature.

[1]: https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#how-it-works

system2•about 1 hour ago

Thank you. This makes sense now.

mrtesthah•about 2 hours ago

How does it compare to https://diskdedupe.com/?

nodesocket•about 2 hours ago

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•25 minutes 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)

dmarinus•about 1 hour ago

I don't think it's very useful but there's already a checksum in the meta data of an S3 object: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/API_Object.h...

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.