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Hyperspace
431–440 of 503 posts
Re: Hyperspace
#432I made a command line utility called `dedup` a while back to do the same thing. It has a dry-run mode, will “intelligently” choose the best clone source, understands hard links and other clones, preserves metadata, deals with HFS compressed files properly. It hasn’t destroyed any of my own data, but like any file system tool, use at your own risk. 0 - https://github.com/ttkb-oss/dedup
See the comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38113396 for a list of alternatives. I used https://github.com/sahib/rmlint in the past and can't complain.
Re: Hyperspace
#433> 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.
Judging by this sub-thread, the process really is harder to explain that it appears on the surface. The basic idea is simple but the implementation requires deeper knowledge.
Re: Hyperspace
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
John has reiterated multiple times on his podcast that he doesn't want to deal with thousands of support requests when making his apps open source and free. All his apps are personal itches he scratched and he sells them not to make a profit but to make the barrier of entry high enough to make user feedback manageable.
Absolutely no judgement for however people want to licence and distribute their software, but I've seen the support burden used as justification for closed source/selling software quite a bit recently, and wonder how often people might be conflating open source with open development. There's no reason an open source project has to accept bug reports or pull requests from anyone. See SQLite or many of the tools from F…
Didn’t SQLite developer(s) famously receive a flood of phone calls because McAfee antivirus used it in a way that was visible (and “suspicious”) to its users?
One does not simply “not accept bug reports”.
https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/e8346d0a889c89ec8a78e6...
Re: Hyperspace
#435> 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.
Judging by this sub-thread, the process really is harder to explain that it appears on the surface. The basic idea is simple but the implementation requires deeper knowledge.
But why would you discuss the implementation to end-users who probably wouldn't even understand what "implementation" means? The discussions you see in the subthread is not a discussion that would appear on less-technical forums, and I wouldn't draw any broader conclusions based on HN conversations in general.
Re: Hyperspace
#436> 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…
This is the standard API for deduplication on Linux (used for btrfs and XFS); you ask the OS nicely to deduplicate a given set of ranges, and it responds by locking the ranges, verifying that they are indeed identical and only then deduplicates for you (you get a field back saying how many bytes were deduplicated from each range). So there's no way a userspace program can mess up your files.
Re: Hyperspace
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
Replying to myself now that I've had a chance to try the scan, but not the deduplication. I work with disc images, program binaries, intermediate representations in a workspace that's 7.6G. A few notes: * By default it doesn't scan everything. It ignores all files but those in an allow list. The way the allow list is structured, it seems like Hyperspace needs to understand the content of a file. As an end user, I hav…
I'm a little surprised that folks here are investing so much time into this app. It's closed source, only available for a non-obious amount, time-limited or subscription-based and lots of details of how it works are missing. With a FOSS project this would have been expected, but with a ShareWare-style model? Idk..
Just because the creator, John Siracusa is famous. If a no-name developer did the app, it wouldn't get this many upvotes and this much attention. He used to write very detailed OS reviews, and I learned a lot from him, including Apple's logical volume manager functions (`diskutil cs`).
Re: Hyperspace
#438Just want to mention: Apple ships a modified version of the copy command (good old cp) that supports the ability to use the cloning feature of APFS by using the -c flag.
And in case your cp doesn't support it, you could also do it by invoking Python. Something like `import Foundation; Foundation.NSFileManager.defaultManager().copyItemAtPath_toPath_error_(...)`.
Re: Hyperspace
#439Start with a story, narrow it down to a problem and show how your solution magically solves that problem. Such a fine example of GREAT marketing.
Re: Hyperspace
#440In 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
You don't need Terminal even, you can view and delete them in Disk Utility.