Hyperspace: Reclaim Disk Space by Cloning Duplicate Files
Hyperspace is a macOS app that finds files with identical contents and reclaims disk space by converting all but one in each group into space-saving clones, without deleting any files. It scans selected folders, lets you review and exclude files, and then reclaims space. The app is free to scan, with one-time or subscription purchases to unlock reclamation. It supports Family Sharing for lifetime and auto-renewing subscriptions, and offers detailed documentation on terms, usage, and limitations.
The Finder does the same thing when you duplicate a file.
- anilakar
For Windows users looking to save space, there's Compactor[1] that uses the NTFS built-in compression opportunistically for only those files that benefit from it. It is not a deduplicator but the basic idea is the same: take an underutilized OS feature and make it usable.
Pretty handy when your flight sim game takes 1.2 terabytes with most of that being sparse terrain mesh data and uncompressed textures. Compressing the whole directory would take over a day according to Microsoft and their infamous progress bar; Compactor gets it done in fifteen minutes.
- oersted
It's quite the dark-pattern to allow you to download it and scan for free, without any clear indication that it's a paid product, and then ambush you with a purchase dangling the space savings in front of your face.
- markn951
I think the record for most space saved by this utility in a single run is in the hundreds of TBs now. I’ll see if I can find the toot.
Edit: maybe a bit hyperbolic of me, looks like it was 3.94TB
- teiferer
It's amazing that this is a product. In an earlier job we used to ask how to do this (discovery phase of deduplication) in the first interview screening. Once you have that list, it's straightforward to make a few syscalls that make it happen.
- a_t48
This uses reflinks, right? I've been experimenting with using reflinks under Linux to speed up layer extraction for Docker, it's great.