What am I missing?

Q: How do I pay for Hyperspace? Hyperspace is a free download in the Mac App Store. Once downloaded, it’s free to scan an unlimited number of files. Scanning will let you know how much space is eligible to be reclaimed.

If you decide you want to reclaim that space, you will need to pay for Hyperspace using the purchase button that appears after a successful scan or by selecting “Purchase Hyperspace…” from the “Hyperspace” menu in the menu bar.

> 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.

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

It might be better to keep an index of paths to checksums and use the checksum as object key in S3.

I'm not sure what you like to achieve but if you use restic with S3 as a backend you can achieve much better deduplicate and compression.