I found out that it wasn't such a good idea to keep tracking the binary. The size of our repository is growing at a much faster rate than I would like. Is it possible to purge this file from git?
No one even needs to know it existed.
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@svick you're right. Is there something I can do? Should I delete the post? – flumpb Mar 07 '12 at 14:44
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That's up to you. You can delete this question if you think it won't be useful to anyone. Or you can let others close it. – svick Mar 07 '12 at 14:53
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Duplicate of [Completely remove file from all Git repository commit history](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/307828/completely-remove-file-from-all-git-repository-commit-history) and [How to remove/delete a large file from commit history in Git repository?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2100907/how-do-i-purge-a-huge-file-from-commits-in-git-history). – Apr 04 '14 at 00:49
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Theres a tool called BFG especially made for this task.
it has the advantage that sha1's referenced in commit messages will be updated too!
- http://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner - main page.
- http://episodes.gitminutes.com/2013/04/gitminutes-06-roberto-tyley-on.html - interview with the author.
While being written in scala its easy to setup and run as a command line program.
ideasman42
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You'll want to use git filter-branch to rewrite the repository. You'll need to synchronize it across all users though and have a stop/restart day.
Wes Hardaker
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See these fine questions and their answers, which explain how to use git filter-branch to do what you want to do:
- Drop old commit: `git rebase` causes merge conflicts
- Update a development team with rewritten Git repo history, removing big files
For storing new big files in the future, I'd recommend using git-annex
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Thanks for pointing these out to me and mentioning git-annex. I'll try that out – flumpb Mar 07 '12 at 14:45
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