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We are currently tracking Siemens PLC programs (TIA projects) in Fossil repos. Now we have to move all repos to Bitbucket and hence I started testing the conversion from Fossil to Git as Bitbucket only supports Git.

One special thing about our repos is that we track the whole project in there including 2 binary project files as only so we can recover the whole project from the repo necessary for opening in TIA (Siemens IDE). These 2 files are not very large (1 between 5-10MB and one around 1MB), however we have quite many commits meanwhile as the projects evolve since a couple of years.

The conversion with Fossil export --git was done successfully for one of our projects.

But ... her comes my point 1: The original Fossil repo had a size of ~600MB. The resulting Git repo now has a size of ~1,5GB which means almost 3times the size of the Fossil repo. Does anyone know why this is? My best guess is that Fossil seems to only track diff artifacts - even for binary files while Git always trackes whole files. Or does Fossil just compress better?

Bitbucket only allows repo sizes < 2GB. So when moving this project to Bitbucket as is we would run into problems very soon. Hence I wanted to test tracking the 2 binary files by Git LFS instead. I used BFG to convert the history of the repo following the guide provided here: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/git/lfs/migrate_to_git_lfs.html with the exception that I mirrored the repo to another place locally as I do not have it on any server yet.

This brought me to my point 2: After running BFG and git reflog/gc I ended up with a smaller repo but the LFS objects folder is now ~3,7GB (what the hell?). I googled a lot up to now but I could not find a sufficient explanation for this strange thing. Does anyone know what the reason?

Thanks heaps :-)

swenamsee
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    Hello, and welcome to SO. Please, try not to ask two distinct questions in one place. I'd suggest you go back, edit your question and put the "part 2" into a separate question. You can link the two together. – Daemon Painter Jun 16 '20 at 13:38
  • @DaemonPainter: Thanks for the comment and the welcome. However, I do not see these 2 points as "distinct questions" but rather 2 parts of the same topic (i.e. how Git handles binary files). – swenamsee Jun 16 '20 at 15:17
  • Does [this question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3601672/how-does-git-deal-with-binary-files) answer the topic of "how Git handles binary files"? – Daemon Painter Jun 16 '20 at 15:33

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