Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hyperspace

hypercritical.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 503 posts

Re: Hyperspace

#81

Post by p_ing »

jarbus wrote: post #28

In my experience, Macs use up a ridiculous amount of "System" storage for no reason that users can't delete. I've grown tired of family members asking me to help them free up storage that I can't even find. That's the major issue from what I've seen; unless this app prevents apple deliberately eating up 50%+ of the storage space of a machine, this doesn't do much for the people I know.

These are often Time Machine snapshots. Nuking those can free up quite a bit of space.

    sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
    sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots

Re: Hyperspace

#82

Post by PenguinRevolver »

CharlesW wrote: post #61
siranachronist wrote: post #13

https://github.com/pkolaczk/fclones can do the same thing, and it's perfectly free and open source. terminal based though

[I was wrong, see below.—cw] It doesn't do the same thing. An APFS clone/copy-on-write clone is not the same as a hard or soft link. https://eclecticlight.co/2019/01/05/aliases-hard-links-symli...

Your source points out that:

You can also create [APFS (copy on write) clones] in Terminal using the command `cp -c oldfilename newfilename` where the c option requires cloning rather than a regular copy.

`fclones dedupe` uses the same command[1]:

  if cfg!(target_os = "macos") {
      result.push(format!("cp -c {target} {link}"));
[1] https://github.com/pkolaczk/fclones/blob/555cde08fde4e700b25...

Re: Hyperspace

#83

Post by diggan »

scblock wrote: post #56
modzu wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whats the price? doesnt seem to be published anywhere

It's on the Mac App Store so you'll find the pricing there. Looks like $10 for one month (one time use maybe?), $20 for a year, $50 lifetime.

Even if I have both a Mac and iPhone, but happen to use my Linux computer right now, it seems like the store page (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hyperspace-reclaim-disk-space/...) is not showing the price, probably because I'm not actively on a Apple device? Seems like a poor UX even for us Mac users.

Re: Hyperspace

#84

Post by protonbob »

diggan wrote: post #75

> Like all my apps, Hyperspace is a bit difficult to explain. I’ve attempted to do so, at length, in the Hyperspace documentation. I hope it makes enough sense to enough people that it will be a useful addition to the Mac ecosystem. Am I missing something, or isn't it a "file de-duplicator" with a nice UI/UX? Sounds pretty simple to describe, and tells you why it's useful with just two words.

No because it isn't getting rid of the duplicate, it's using a feature of APFS that allows for duplicates to exist separately but share the same internal data.

Re: Hyperspace

#85

Post by jeroenhd »

frizlab wrote: post #80
bflesch wrote: post #69

[flagged]

It is not a hard link. A clone is an independent file which is backed by the same storage. So far mostly the same as a hard link you’ll say. However if you modify a clone, it will be “uncloned” and will be modified independently of its clones.

Does APFS have the extent-level deduplication Linux filesystems have or is it only file-level deduplication?

While it's not very user-friendly software (command line, after all), duperemove has proven quite useful for my filesystems.

Re: Hyperspace

#86

Post by Analemma_ »

svilen_dobrev wrote: post #78

$ rmlint -c sh:link -L -y s -p -T duplicates will produce a script which, if run, will hardlink duplicates

That's not what this app is doing though. APFS clones are copy-on-write pointers to the same data, not hardlinks.

Re: Hyperspace

#87

Post by p_ing »

bob1029 wrote: post #48

> There is no way for Hyperspace to cooperate with all other applications and macOS itself to coordinate a “safe” time for those files to be replaced, nor is there a way for Hyperspace for forcibly take exclusive control of those files. This got me wondering why the filesystem itself doesn't run a similar kind of deduplication process in the background. Presumably, it is at a level of abstraction where it could safel…

Windows Server does this for NTFS and ReFS volumes. I used it quite a bit on ReFS w/ Hyper-V VMs and it worked wonders. Cut my storage usage down by ~45% with a majority of Windows Server VMs running a mix of 2016/2019 at the time.

Re: Hyperspace

#88

Post by taneliv »

bob1029 wrote: post #48

> There is no way for Hyperspace to cooperate with all other applications and macOS itself to coordinate a “safe” time for those files to be replaced, nor is there a way for Hyperspace for forcibly take exclusive control of those files. This got me wondering why the filesystem itself doesn't run a similar kind of deduplication process in the background. Presumably, it is at a level of abstraction where it could safel…

On ZFS it consumes a lot of RAM. In part I think this is because ZFS does it on the block level, and has to keep track of a lot of blocks to compare against when a new one is written out. It might be easier on resources if implemented on the file level. Not sure if the implementation would be simpler or more complex.

It might also be a little unintuitive that modifying one byte of a large file would result in a lot disk activity, as the file system would need to duplicate the file again.

Re: Hyperspace

#89

Post by yayoohooyahoo »

protonbob wrote: post #84
diggan wrote: post #75

> Like all my apps, Hyperspace is a bit difficult to explain. I’ve attempted to do so, at length, in the Hyperspace documentation. I hope it makes enough sense to enough people that it will be a useful addition to the Mac ecosystem. Am I missing something, or isn't it a "file de-duplicator" with a nice UI/UX? Sounds pretty simple to describe, and tells you why it's useful with just two words.

No because it isn't getting rid of the duplicate, it's using a feature of APFS that allows for duplicates to exist separately but share the same internal data.

Is it not the same as a hard link (which I believe are supported on Mac too)?

Re: Hyperspace

#90

Post by diggan »

protonbob wrote: post #84
diggan wrote: post #75

> Like all my apps, Hyperspace is a bit difficult to explain. I’ve attempted to do so, at length, in the Hyperspace documentation. I hope it makes enough sense to enough people that it will be a useful addition to the Mac ecosystem. Am I missing something, or isn't it a "file de-duplicator" with a nice UI/UX? Sounds pretty simple to describe, and tells you why it's useful with just two words.

No because it isn't getting rid of the duplicate, it's using a feature of APFS that allows for duplicates to exist separately but share the same internal data.

Right, but the concept is the same, "remove duplicates" in order to save storage space. If it's using reflinks, softlinks, APFS clones or whatever is more or less an implementation detail.

I know that internally it isn't actually "removing" anything, and that it uses fancy new technology from Apple. But in order to explain the project to strangers, I think my tagline gets the point across pretty well.

Post reply on HN