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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

I gave it a try on my massive folder of NodeJS projects but it only found 1GB of savings on a 8.1GB folder.

I then tried again including my user home folder (731K files, 127K folders, 2755 eligible files) to hopefully catch more savings and I only ended up at 1.3GB of savings (300MB more than just what was in the NodeJS folders.)

I tried to scan System and Library but it refused to do so because of permission issues.

I think the fact that I use pnpm for my package manager has made my disk space usage already pretty near optimal.

Oh well. Neat idea. But the current price is too high to justify this. Also I would want it as a background process that runs once a month or something.

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> it only found 1GB of savings on a 8.1GB folder.

You "only" found that 12% of the space you are using is wasted? Am I reading this right?

I have a 512GB drive in my MacBook Air M3 with 225GB free. Saving 1GB is 0.5% of my total free space, and it is definitely "below my line." It is a neat tool still in concept.

When I ran it on my home folder with 165GB of data it only found 1.3GB of savings. This isn't that significant to me and it isn't really worth paying for.

BTW I highly recommend the free "disk-inventory-x" utility for MacOS space management.

Your original comment did not mention that your home folder was 165 GB, which is extremely relevant here

The relevant number (missing from above) is the total amount of space on that storage device. If it saves 1GB on a 8TB drive, it's not a big win.

It should be proportional to the total used space, not the space available. The previous commenter said it was a 1 GB savings from ~8 GB of used space; that's equally significant whether it happens on a 10 GB drive or a 10 TB one.

He picked node_modules because it's highly likely to encounter redundant files there.

If you read the rest of the comment he only saved another 30% running his entire user home directory through it.

So this is not a linear trend based on space used.

He "only" saved 30%? That's amazing. I really doubt most people are going to get anywhere near that.

When I run it on my home folder (Roughly 500GB of data) I find 124 MB of duplicated files.

At this stage I'd like it to tell me what those files are - The dupes are probably dumb ones that I can simply go delete by hand, but I can understand why he'd want people to pay up first, as by simply telling me what the dupes are he's proved the app's value :-)

> He "only" saved 30%? That's amazing. I really doubt most people are going to get anywhere near that.

You misunderstood my comment. I ran it on my home folder which contains 165GB of data and it found 1.3GB is savings. That isn't significant for me to care about because I currently have 225GB free of my 512GB drive.

BTW I highly recommend the free "disk-inventory-x" utility for MacOS space management.

Everyone misunderstood your comment for a reason.

You wrote: but it only found 1GB of savings on a 8.1GB folder.

It’s quite a saving and that’s what everyone understood from your comment.

I think this is somewhat funny.

His comment is pretty understandable if you've done frontend work in javascript.

Node_modules is so ripe for duplicate content that some tools explicitly call out that they're disk efficient (It's literally in the tagline for PNPM "Fast, disk space efficient package manager": https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm)

So he got ok results (~13% savings) on possibly the best target content available in a user's home directory.

Then he got results so bad it's utterly not worth doing on the rest (0.10% - not 10%, literally 1/10 of a single percent).

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Deduplication isn't super simple, isn't always obviously better, and can require other system resources in unexpected ways (ex - lots of CPU and RAM). It's a cool tech to fiddle with on a NAS, and I'm generally a fan of modern CoW filesystems (incl APFS).

But I want to be really clear - this is people picking spare change out of the couch style savings. Penny wise, pound foolish. The only people who are likely to actually save anything buying this app probably already know it, and have a large set of real options available. Everyone else is falling into the "download more ram" trap.

Another 30% more than the 1GB saved in node modules, for 1.3GB total. Not 30% of total disk space.

For reference, from the comment they’re talking about:

> I then tried again including my user home folder (731K files, 127K folders, 2755 eligible files) to hopefully catch more savings and I only ended up at 1.3GB of savings (300MB more than just what was in the NodeJS folders.)

If it saved 8.1GB, by your measure it'd also not be a big win?

This is basically only a win on macOS, and only because Apple charges through the nose for disk space.

Ex - On my non-apple machines, 8GB is trivial. I load them up with the astoundingly cheap NVMe drives in the multiple terabyte range (2TB for ~$100, 4TB for ~$250) and I have a cheap NAS.

So that "big win" is roughly 40 cents of hardware costs on the direct laptop hardware. Hardly worth the time and effort involved, even if the risk is zero (and I don't trust it to be zero).

If it's just "storage" and I don't need it fast (the perfect case for this type of optimization) I throw it on my NAS where it's cheaper still... Ex - it's not 40 cents saved, it's ~10.

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At least for me, 8GB is no longer much of a win. It's a rounding error on the last LLM model I downloaded.

And I'd suggest that basically anyone who has the ability to not buy extortionately priced drives soldered onto a mainboard is not really winning much here either.

I picked up a quarter off the ground on my walk last night. That's a bigger win.

If Apple charges extortionately through the nose for storage hardware, that just makes this tool more valuable.

> This is basically only a win on macOS, and only because Apple charges through the nose for disk space

You do realize that this software is only available on macOS, and only works because of Apple's APFS filesystem? You're essentially complaining that medicine is only a win for people who are sick.

> and only works because of Apple's APFS filesystem

There are lots of other file systems that support this kind of deduplication...

Like ZFS that the author of the software explicitly mentions in his write up https://www.truenas.com/docs/references/zfsdeduplication/

Or Btrfs ex: https://kb.synology.com/en-id/DSM/help/DSM/StorageManager/vo...

Or hell, even NTFS: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/dat...

This is NOT a novel or new feature in filesystems... Basically any CoW file system will do it, and lots of other filesystems have hacks built on top to support this kinds of feature.

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My point is that "people are only sick" because the company is pricing storage outrageously. Not that Apple is the only offender in this space - but man are they the most egregious.

Absolutely, 100% backwards. The tool cannot save space from disk space that is not scanned. Your "not a big win" comment assumes that there is no space left to be reclaimed on the rest of the disk. Or that the disk is not empty, or that the rest of the disk can't be reclaimed at an even higher rate.

pnpm tries to be a drop-in replacement for npm, and dedupes automatically.

More importantly, pnpm installs packages as symlinks, so the deduping is rather more effective. I believe it also tries to mirror the NPM folder structure and style of deduping as well, but if you have two of the same package installed anywhere on your system, pnpm will only need to download and save one copy of that package.

npm's --install-strategy=linked flag is supposed to do this too, but it has been broken in several ways for years.

> pnpm tries to be a drop-in replacement for npm

True

> and dedupes automatically

Also true.

But the way you put them after each other, makes it sound like npm does de-duplication, and since pnpm tries to be a drop-in replacement for npm, so does pnpm.

So for clarification: npm doesn't do de-duplication across all your projects, and that in particular was of the more useful features that pnpm brought to the ecosystem when it first arrived.

> I tried to scan System and Library but it refused to do so because of permission issues.

macOS has a sealed volume which is why you're seeing permission errors.

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/signed-system-volum...

For some reason "disk-inventory-x" will scan those folders. I used that amazing tool to prune left over Unreal Engine files and docker caches when they put them not in my home folder. The tool asks for a ton of permissions when you run it in order to do the scan though, which is a bit annoying.

It’s not obvious but the system folder is on a separate, secure volume; the Finder does some trickery to make the system volume and the data volume appear as one.

In general, you don’t want to mess with that.

Didn't have time to try it myself, but there is an option for minimal files size to consider clearly seen on the AppStore screenshot. I suppose it was introduced to minimize comparison buffers. It is possible that node modules are sliding under this size and wasn't considered.

whats the price? doesnt seem to be published anywhere

It's on the Mac App Store so you'll find the pricing there. Looks like $10 for one month (one time use maybe?), $20 for a year, $50 lifetime.

Even if I have both a Mac and iPhone, but happen to use my Linux computer right now, it seems like the store page (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hyperspace-reclaim-disk-space/...) is not showing the price, probably because I'm not actively on a Apple device? Seems like a poor UX even for us Mac users.

It's buried under a drop-down in the "Information" section, under "In-App Purchases". I agree, it's not the greatest.

It’s a side effect of the terrible store design.

It’s a free app because you don’t have to buy it to run it. It will tell you how much space it can save you for free. So you don’t have to waste $20 to find out it only would’ve been 2kb.

But that means the parts you actually have to buy are in app purchases, which are always hidden on the store pages.

Åh, you're absolutely right, missed that completely. Buried at the bottom of the page :) Thanks for pointing it out.

I see it on my android phone. It's a free app but the subs are an in-app purchase so you need to hunt that section down.

£9.99 a month, £19.99 for one year, £49.99 for life (app store purchase prices visible once you've scanned a directory).

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