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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The app store identifies apps with paid features. You shouldn't be entirely surprised.
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.
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
This uses reflinks, right? I've been experimenting with using reflinks under Linux to speed up layer extraction for Docker, it's great.
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
How does this compare to diskDedupe, which has been around longer and is much cheaper?
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?
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.
Here’s a lengthier explanation [1] but it’s basically an APFS feature.
[1]: https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#how-it-works
Thank you. This makes sense now.
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.
How does it compare to https://diskdedupe.com/?