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Hyperspace

hypercritical.co

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Re: Hyperspace

#461

Post by alwillis »

kccqzy wrote: post #438
alwillis wrote: post #401

Just 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_(...)`.

Apparently the cp command in CoreUtilities also supports copy-on-write on macOS: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/311536/cp-reflink-a...

Re: Hyperspace

#462

Post by staticfish »

omnibrain wrote: post #406

My personal head canon is that Steve Jobs personally cancelled ZFS in OSX because Jonathan Schwartz prematurely announced it.

I assumed it was patent-encumbered that could not be reconciled by either party.

Re: Hyperspace

#463

Post by nielsbot »

nsonha wrote: post #407
nielsbot wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disk Utility.app manages to keep the OS running while make the disk exclusive-access.. I wonder how it does that.

It doesn't? Freeze when commiting operations.

I was musing about this comment:

> 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.

Maybe not solving the same problem.

Re: Hyperspace

#464

Post by alwillis »

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…

Probably because APFS runs on everything from the Apple Watch to the Mac Pro and everything in between.

You probably don’t want your phone or watch de-duping stuff.

There are tons of knobs you can tweak in macOS but Apple has always been pretty conservative when it comes to what should be default behavior for the vast majority of their users.

Certainly when you duplicate a file using the Finder or use cp -c at the command line, the Copy-on-Write functionality is being used; most users don’t need to know that.

Re: Hyperspace

#465

Post by gcr »

I’ve experimented with reflinks and other APFS operations.

Here’s a question though: how does this work with transparently compressed files on APFS?

In my past experience, using reflinks is fine and using transparent compression is fine, but combining them leads to hard-to-debug file corruption.

Re: Hyperspace

#466

Post by karparov »

notatallshaw wrote: post #457
karparov wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, that's a BS reason. If you don't want that, just ignore all opened issues. That's it. If you are nice then you put a README that explains this in a sentence or two. If a community forms that wants to fix issues, for example critical ones that could lead to data loss then the community will deal with it, e.g. by forking. Just keeping everything closed is really missing the point of how trust in infra that handl…

As I understand it, from listening to the podcast, a better summary is that if it becomes popular, he wants it to be worthwhile for him to keep working on. Apps like this can easily bit rot, and more users does often mean more work e.g. answering or filtering emails, finding more edge cases, etc. From his perspective that means having a income to dedicate time to this. I don't think he's interested in being an "infra…

I still maintain that if that's the case then something is wrong. More users reporting bugs for relevant edge cases is not a nuisance, it's the crowdsourcing of testing and each such reported issue is gold because then he can fix it before he as a user of his own software runs into it. Assuming he actually uses the software. (I also do maintain a bunch of packages and I do use them daily.)

Making software proprietary and for-pay, especially such a small tool, doesn't just significantly reduce the number of eyeballs this testing is crowdsourced to, but it also disincentivises issue reporting .. why should I spend the time to for free report sth to somebody who is making money off my testing and doesn't even bother to be transparent about how things work exactly (i.e. the source)?

If you really care about the quality of your work then maximizing the eye ball count and incentivise high qualith issue reporting.

Though if you want to maximize income instead, you keep it closed and ask for a subscription.

Quite obvious which option he chose.

Re: Hyperspace

#467

Post by [deleted] »

MBCook wrote: post #194
petercooper wrote: post #6

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 t…

[deleted]

Re: Hyperspace

#468

Post by brailsafe »

petercooper wrote: post #6

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!

For me the value in a dedup app like this isn't as much the space savings, since I just don't generate huge amounts, but it's the lack of duplicated files, some of which or all in aggregate may be large. There are some weird scenarios where this occurs, usually due to having to reconcile a hard drive recovery with another location for the files, or a messy download directory with an organized destination.

For example, I discovered my time machine backup kicked out the oldest versions of files I didn't know it had a record of and thought I'd long since lost, but it destroyed the names of the directories and obfuscated the contents somewhat. Thousands of numerically named directories, some of which have files I may want to hang onto, but don't know whether I already have them or not, or where they are since it's completely unstructured. Likewise, many of them may just have one of the same build system text file I can obvs toss away.

Re: Hyperspace

#469

Post by wubrr »

notatallshaw wrote: post #458
wubrr wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he doesn't want to deal with thousands of support requests when making his apps open source and free. Who says you have to deal with support requests if you open source something? > 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. That makes no sense

> Who says you have to deal with support requests if you open source something? Almost anyone who has ever maintained popular open-source software, even if dealing with them means putting up a notice that says "Don't ask support questions" and having to delete angrily posted issues. My understanding from listening to his explanation is he wants to be able to support users and have an income stream to incentivize that…

> Almost anyone who has ever maintained popular open-source software, even if dealing with them means putting up a notice that says "Don't ask support questions" and having to delete angrily posted issues.

I mean, that's very obviously a false statement. You don't have to post any notices or reply to or delete any issues.

> My understanding from listening to his explanation is he wants to be able to support users and have an income stream to incentivize that.

That's valid, but is basically the opposite of the reasoning provided in gp comment.

Re: Hyperspace

#470

Post by wubrr »

notatallshaw wrote: post #457
karparov wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, that's a BS reason. If you don't want that, just ignore all opened issues. That's it. If you are nice then you put a README that explains this in a sentence or two. If a community forms that wants to fix issues, for example critical ones that could lead to data loss then the community will deal with it, e.g. by forking. Just keeping everything closed is really missing the point of how trust in infra that handl…

As I understand it, from listening to the podcast, a better summary is that if it becomes popular, he wants it to be worthwhile for him to keep working on. Apps like this can easily bit rot, and more users does often mean more work e.g. answering or filtering emails, finding more edge cases, etc. From his perspective that means having a income to dedicate time to this. I don't think he's interested in being an "infra…

> As someone who maintains critical open-source software, I can strongly empathize, even if it’s not an approach I would take.

Pretty strange thing to say in the context of a closed source app.

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