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Hyperspace

hypercritical.co

191–200 of 503 posts

Re: Hyperspace

#191

Nice, but I'm not getting a subscription for a filesystem utility. Had it been a one-time $5 license, I would have bought it. At the current price, it's literally cheaper to put files in a S3 bucket or outright buy an SSD.

"I don't value software but that's not a respectable opinion so I'll launder that opinion via subscriptions"

Re: Hyperspace

#192

Nice, but I'm not getting a subscription for a filesystem utility. Had it been a one-time $5 license, I would have bought it. At the current price, it's literally cheaper to put files in a S3 bucket or outright buy an SSD.

There are several such tools for Linux, and they are free, so maybe just change operating systems.

Re: Hyperspace

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point, why hash them instead of just using the first 1024 bytes as-is?

And why first 1024, can pick from predefined points.

Depending on the medium, the penalty of reading single bytes in sparse locations could be comparable with reading the whole file. Maybe not a big win.

Re: Hyperspace

#194

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!

He’s talked about it on the podcast he was on. So many users would buy this, run it once, then save a few gigs and be done. So a subscription didn’t make a ton of sense.

After all how many perfect duplicate files do you probably create a month accidentally?

There’s a subscription or buy forever option for people who think that would actually be quite useful to them. But for a ton of people a one time IAP that gives them a limited amount of time to use the program really does make a lot of sense.

And you can always rerun it for free to see if you have enough stuff worth paying for again.

Re: Hyperspace

#195

Interesting idea, and I like the idea of people getting paid for making useful things. Also, I get a data security itch having a random piece of software from the internet scan every file on an HD, particularly on a work machine where some lawyers might care about what's reading your hard drive. It would be nice if it was open source, so you could see what it's doing.

> I like the idea of people getting paid for making useful things

> It would be nice if it was open source

> I get a data security itch having a random piece of software from the internet scan every file on an HD

With the source it would be easy for others to create freebie versions, with or without respecting license restrictions or security.

I am not arguing anything, except pondering how software economics and security issues are full of unresolved holes, and the world isn't getting default fairer or safer.

--

The app was a great idea, indeed. I am now surprised Apple doesn't automatically reclaim storage like this. Kudos to the author.

Re: Hyperspace

#196
I don't understand why a simple, closed source de-dup app is at the top of the front page with 160+ comments? What is so interesting about it? I read the blog and the comments here and I still don't get it.

Re: Hyperspace

#197

Interesting idea, and I like the idea of people getting paid for making useful things. Also, I get a data security itch having a random piece of software from the internet scan every file on an HD, particularly on a work machine where some lawyers might care about what's reading your hard drive. It would be nice if it was open source, so you could see what it's doing.

You could download the app, disconnect Wifi and Ethernet, run the app and the reclamation process, remove the app (remember, you have the guarantees of the macOS App Store so no kernel extensions etc), and then reconnect.

Edit: this might not work with the payment option actually. I don't think you can IAP without the internet.

Re: Hyperspace

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

If I understand correctly, a COW clone references the same contents (just like a hardlink) as long as all the filesystem references are pointing to identical file contents. Once you open one of the reference handles and modify the contents, the copy-on-write process is invoked by the filesystem, and the underlying data is copied into a new, separate file with your new changes, breaking the link. Comparing with a hard…

That’s correct.

Re: Hyperspace

#199

What algorithm does the application use to figure out if two files are identical? There's a lot of interesting algorithms out there. Hashes, bit by bit comparison etc. But these techniques have their own disadvantages. What is the best way to do this for a large amount of files?

I don't know exactly what Siracusa is doing here, but I can take an educated guess: For each candidate file, you need some "key" that you can use to check if another candidate file is the same. There can be millions of files so the key needs to be small and quick to generate, but at the same time we don't want any false positives. The obvious answer today is a SHA256 hash of the file's contents; It's very fast, not t…

Or just use whatever algorithm rsync uses.

Re: Hyperspace

#200

I don't understand why a simple, closed source de-dup app is at the top of the front page with 160+ comments? What is so interesting about it? I read the blog and the comments here and I still don't get it.

The developer is popular and APFS cloning is genuinely technically interesting.

(no, it's not a symlink)

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