Hyperspace 1.0
There are plenty of Mac apps that will save disk space by finding duplicate files and then deleting the duplicates. Using APFS clones, my app could reclaim disk space without removing any files! As a digital pack rat, this appealed to me immensely.
By the end of that week, I’d written a barebones Mac app to do the same thing my Perl script was doing. In the months that followed, I polished and tested the app, and christened it Hyperspace. I’m happy to announce that Hyperspace is now available in the Mac App Store.
Hyperspace is a free download, and it’s free to scan to see how much space you might save. To actually reclaim any of that space, you will have to pay for the app.
It costs $19.99/year, $9.99/month, or $49.99 lifetime. As he says, it’s “dangerous,” but I trust Siracusa to be careful and get it right. However, this and other duplicate finder apps are not for me. I know from first principles where most of my duplicates are, and how they result from the way I build my apps and Web sites. You have to pay to see which duplicates Hyperspace found, but the overall total was in the expected range. I don’t really care about saving a quarter of a percent of the space on my SSD. I assume my situation is not typical or this wouldn’t be such a popular app category.
On my MacBook Pro, used for far less strenuous tasks, the potential savings are around 57 MB.
I took Hyperspace for a spin to see what it could find on my Mac Studio, which stores about 2.5 TB of data. The scan was impressively fast at around 30 seconds, identifying 4.04 GB of data that it could free up. That’s not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it was also nice to know that I don’t generate a lot of duplicate files with my workflows.
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Mmm, might just try this. It's an idea I've had myself, but I doubt I'd see any significant savings.
Of course, you could just as easily use a tool like fdupes to find the duplicates and then just use "cp" to create the clones. Perhaps for that reason, the price offends, somewhat.
