Hyperspace is a brand new Mac utility designed to save lots of space for storing. It merges information utilized by duplicate information, utilizing a trick carried out by Apple within the Mac’s trendy file system, providing you with extra space for storing with none adjustments to your seen information.
Mac computer systems have used the Apple File System (often known as APFS) because the default file system since macOS 10.13 Excessive Sierra, changing the HFS+ system relationship again to the Nineties, and APFS is now used on all trendy Apple gadgets. One in all its benefits is support for file clones, which permits the working system to create copies of information with out duplicating the whole contents in storage. While you duplicate a file within the Finder in macOS, it’s immediate and doesn’t take up the whole space for storing of the unique file, as a result of macOS utilizing APFS cloning behind the scenes.
John Siracusa created Hyperspace as a instrument to scan for information with the identical content material, even when they don’t have the identical file names, and merge them collectively utilizing APFS cloning. For instance, in case you have some purposes that every have their very own copies of assets (resembling packaged libraries and runtimes), Hyperspace can mark them as file clones for macOS. The information nonetheless seem like they’re in the identical place within the filesystem, and your purposes received’t discover the distinction.
The weblog publish for Hyperspace explains, “Regardless of realizing about clone information for the reason that APFS introduction almost eight years in the past, I didn’t give them a lot thought past the tiny thrill of realizing that I wasn’t consuming any extra disk area once I duplicated a big file within the Finder. However late final 12 months, as my Mac’s disk slowly stuffed, I began to muse about how I would have the ability to get some disk area again. If I might discover information that had the identical content material however weren’t clones of one another, I might convert them into clones that each one shared a single occasion of the info on disk.”
Hyperspace is a free obtain from the Mac App Retailer, and you may run it to see how a lot storage could be reclaimed. I ran it on my house folder on my M1 Mac Mini, which has been in fixed use since 2022, and Hyperspace discovered 748MB of potential financial savings. You possibly can run Hyperspace on any folder or drive, but it surely must be an APFS-formatted quantity. This received’t enable you with a FAT32 flash stick or an previous HFS+ Mac drive.
Importantly, Hyperspace isn’t a typical cleanup instrument, because it received’t attempt to delete unused information. For those who’re attempting to determine what’s consuming up all of your Mac’s storage, you’ll nonetheless must do some digging or use an app like DaisyDisk (the model on the location has extra options than the Mac App Retailer model) or CleanMyMac. There’s additionally a fundamental file storage reporting instrument obtainable within the System Settings, in case you navigate to Normal > Storage and click on the knowledge buttons on every menu itemizing.
Siracusa additionally defined a few of the instrument’s growth within the weblog publish, saying, “I took a day to whip up a Perl script (that referred to as out to a command-line instrument written in C and one other written in Swift) to run towards my disk to see how a lot area I would have the ability to save by doing this. It turned out to be lots: dozens of gigabytes. At this level, there was no turning again. I needed to make this into an app. […] By the tip of that week, I’d written a barebones Mac app to do the identical factor my Perl script was doing. Within the months that adopted, I polished and examined the app, and christened it Hyperspace.”
You possibly can download Hyperspace for free from the Mac App Store for macOS 15.0 and better. Reclaiming storage prices $10/month, $20/12 months, or the $50 lifetime unlock. The month-to-month and yearly choices don’t renew robotically until you explicitly select the subscription possibility.
Supply: Hypercritical through John Siracusa (Mastodon)