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 "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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
