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.
Update (2025-02-28): John Siracusa:
The current version doesn’t look inside Photos libraries or any other kind of “bundle” file. This may change in future versions.
Update (2025-04-02): Howard Oakley:
I unhesitatingly recommend everyone to download it from the App Store, and at least check their Home folder to see if it’s worth paying to reclaim space. You have absolutely nothing to lose.
In my case, perhaps because I tend to clone files using the Finder’s Duplicate command, the savings that it offered were of little benefit, but your Home folder could be different and release 100 GB or more.
Update (2025-04-03): Zac Hall:
The latest version [1.2] of the space-saving Mac app introduces support for reclaiming storage without deleting files from cloud services like Apple’s iCloud Drive, Microsoft’s OneDrive, and more.
Here are the release notes.
Hyperspace has also supported scanning and reclaiming files inside “package” directories (e.g., Apple Photos libraries, iMovie libraries, Logic Pro projects. etc.) since version 1.1 (released on March 14th).
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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.
I have tremendous respect for John Siracusa, but those are hyperprices for an app that's basically single-purpose, and an app one would probably use on an irregular basis.
> I assume my situation is not typical or this wouldn’t be such a popular app category.
I believe the appeal of those apps are a combination of 128/256 GB models and a lack of file organization skills or efforts. (I haven't found the appeal as a proficient user with 256 GB.)
But this app's market is seemingly only Mac nerds, facilitated by Siracusa's influencer marketing.
I don't know what developers are expecting when they introduce prices like these, but I would never pay such prices out of principle. In fact, I'll even be even more frank and say that prices like these encourage me to pirate your product.
not that I have any use of this particular piece of software - this is just a general comment.
@Someone An interesting point is that Siracusa offers both recurring subscriptions and one-time unlocks for a month/year. I would be really interested to know if, for people who do need this type of product, whether they would need to use it once/yearly/monthly. I could see a one-time $10 as a bargain if you have tons of duplicates filling up your internal SSD and this allows you to avoid having to buy a whole new MacBook. Since it doesn’t actually get rid of the duplicates, I guess they’ll come back any time you restore from backup or migrate to a new Mac, so then you’d need to run it again.
