Hyperspace

(hypercritical.co)

30 points | by swyx 2 hours ago

8 comments

  • oersted 54 minutes 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 40 minutes 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 13 minutes 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.
        • alsetmusic 11 minutes ago
          The app store identifies apps with paid features. You shouldn't be entirely surprised.
        • Analemma_ 8 minutes 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.

    • greenpizza13 11 minutes 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.

  • markn951 1 hour 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 21 minutes ago
    This uses reflinks, right? I've been experimenting with using reflinks under Linux to speed up layer extraction for Docker, it's great.
  • starkshift 53 minutes 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
  • steve_taylor 1 hour ago
    How does this compare to diskDedupe, which has been around longer and is much cheaper?
  • system2 28 minutes 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 18 minutes 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.

    • ianmurrays 22 minutes ago
      Here’s a lengthier explanation [1] but it’s basically an APFS feature.

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

      • system2 16 minutes ago
        Thank you. This makes sense now.
  • mrtesthah 1 hour ago
    How does it compare to https://diskdedupe.com/?
  • nodesocket 1 hour 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.
    • dmarinus 2 minutes 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.