Are you deleting the others and creating a symlink to the original? How does this work exactly? I didn't get it from the FAQ section.

Does this mean that if the original is gone, all the file links will not be found?

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_diyar a day ago | parent | next [-]

No, this uses a feature of the macOS file system. From the FAQ:

> Q: Are clone files the same thing as symbolic links or hard links?

> A: No. Symbolic links (“symlinks”) and hard links are ways to make two entries in the file system that share the same data. This might sound like the same thing as the space-saving clones used by Hyperspace, but there’s one important difference. With symlinks and hard links, a change to one of the files affects all the files.

> The space-saving clones made by Hyperspace are different. Changes to one clone file do not affect other files. Cloned files should look and behave exactly the same as they did before they were converted into clones.

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deathanatos a day ago | parent [-]

It's a CoW (copy-on-write) file, it sounds like.

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KingMob a day ago | parent [-]

Yes, but it sounds like it's more fine-grained than just the file-level. So even if you change part of one copy, the remaining unchanged subpieces are still shared, iiuc.

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rbanffy a day ago | parent [-]

CoW deduplicates at the block level. Unless you rewrite the whole file, the untouched blocks will remain common between them and only different blocks will be allocated separately.

Continuous block level deduplication is resource intensive and not a great fit unless space is at a high premium.

Offline block deduping is interesting though, but only for solid state storage. For hard disks it’s a nightmare.

	▲	system2 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It sounds very much like a video encoder.

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ianmurrays a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Here’s a lengthier explanation [1] but it’s basically an APFS feature.

[1]: https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#how-it-works

	▲	system2 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you. This makes sense now.