I was researching this topic some time ago too when I wanted to find ways to dedupe files on my Mac: ie, show me which files are actual duplicates, which are cheap clones, and convert any real duplicates to clones.
Anyone know if something reliable like this exists? I swear like a year ago I found ‘fdupes’ on GitHub (seems gone now) and it had that feature but it wasn’t clear from GitHub issues if it’s not buggy.
The article completely overlooked one of the greatest benefits of a copy-on-write file system, which is snapshots. APFS is able to create snapshots of entire volumes near instantaneously, and is used by Time Machine for performing backups.
I wish they opened it up more and give us the tools to manage snapshots. Time Machine gives you no guarantees, it'll prune them when it sees fit, so I don't trust it. I wish I could give up my clunkier setup for APFS snapshots.
Depends on what you mean by homebrew version of cp.
cp isn’t a package on homebrew, but I suspect you’re talking about the gnu coreutils which contain the gnu cp.
That one does not have the flag.
However I think you were still using the old macOS cp without knowing because long time ago when I played with this package, they all were prepended with a g. Like gcp instead of cp.
Why isn't content addressable inodes a thing? Address them by hash instead of id and avoid creating duplicate inodes. So for example, two 1TB files containing all zeroes will take up one inode worth of disk space but the fs table records 1TB worth of inodes. You tune the fs inode sllocation table disk usage a lot, what other downsides are there?
Anyone know if something reliable like this exists? I swear like a year ago I found ‘fdupes’ on GitHub (seems gone now) and it had that feature but it wasn’t clear from GitHub issues if it’s not buggy.