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Hyperspace

hypercritical.co

131–140 of 503 posts

Re: Hyperspace

#131

A 20$ 1 year licence for something that probably has a FOSS equivalent on Linux... However, considering Apple will never ever ever allow user replaceable storage on a laptop, this might be worth it.

[deleted]

Re: Hyperspace

#132
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…

data loss is the largest concern I still do not trust de-duplication software.

Question for the developer: what's your liability if user files are corrupted?

Re: Hyperspace

#134
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Right, but the concept is the same, "remove duplicates" in order to save storage space. The duplicates aren't removed, though. Nothing changes from the POV of users or software that use those files, and you can continue to make changes to them independently.

De-duplication does not mean the duplicates completely disappear. If I download a deduplication utility I expect it to create some sort of soft/hard link. I definitely don’t want it to completely remove random files on the filesystem, that’s just going to wreak havoc.

Re: Hyperspace

#136
> Hyperspace can’t be installed on “Macintosh HD” because macOS version 15 or later is required.

macOS 15 was released in September 2024, this feels far too soon to deprecate older versions.

Re: Hyperspace

#137

> Hyperspace can’t be installed on “Macintosh HD” because macOS version 15 or later is required. macOS 15 was released in September 2024, this feels far too soon to deprecate older versions.

He wanted to write it in Swift 6. Does it support older OS versions?

Re: Hyperspace

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My understanding is that it is a copy-on-write clone, not a hard link. [1] > 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…

What kind of changes could you make to one clone that would still qualify it as a clone? If there are changes, it's no longer the same file. Even after reading the How It Works[0] link, I'm not groking how it works. Is it making some sort of delta/diff that is applied to the original file? That's not possible for every file format like large media files. I could see that being interesting for text based files, but that gets complicated for complex files.

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

Re: Hyperspace

#139

Would be nice if git could make use of this on macOS. Each worktree I usually work on is several gigs of (mostly) identical files. Unfortunately the source files are often deep in a compressed git pack file, so you can't de-duplicate that. (Of course, the bigger problem is the build artefacts on each branch, which are like 12G per debug/release per product, but they often diverge for boring reasons.)

"git worktree" shares a .git folder between multiple checkouts. You'll still have multiple files in working copy, but at least the .pack files would be shared. It is great feature, very robust, I use it all the time.

There is also ".git/objects/info/alternates", accessed via "--shared"/"--reference" option of "git clone", that allows only sharing of object storage and not branches etc... but it is has caveats, and I've only used it in some special circumstances.

Re: Hyperspace

#140

I love the model of it being free to scan and see if you'd get any benefit, then paying for the actual results. I, too, am a packrat, ran it, and got 7GB to reclaim. Not quite worth the squeeze for me, but I appreciate it existing!

I also really like this pricing model.

I wish it were more obvious how to do it with other software. Often there's a learning curve in the way before you can see the value.

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