Hyperspace ⇥ hypercritical.co

New app from John Siracusa:

Hyperspace searches for files with identical contents within one or more folders. If it finds any, it can then reclaim the disk space taken by all but one of the identical files — without removing any of the files!

You can learn more about how this is done, if you’re interested, but the short version is that Hyperspace uses a standard feature of the macOS file system: space-saving clones. The Finder does the same thing when you duplicate a file.

The screenshots on the Mac App Store listing might look like one of those “download more RAM” scams — “reclaim disk space… without removing files!” — but this is not fake. Stephen Hackett reclaimed “nearly a gigabyte”; John Voorhees, of MacStories, freed up 4.4 GB.

My situation is much less dramatic. Hyperspace requires MacOS 15, which means I cannot run it on my iMac containing a local copy of my music library, photos, and fifteen years of migrated data. On my MacBook Pro, used for far less strenuous tasks, the potential savings are around 57 MB. Luckily, Siracusa’s business model accounts for this — you can scan for free but you need to pay to de-duplicate data.