Comment by phiresky

Git does actually diff binaries and stores them very efficiently :) If you do a single small UPDATE in your db file git will only store the changed information. It's just kinda slow, and for most binary files the effort git spends to try and compute deltas for binary files is useless - which is why it has a bad reputation for binary files.

Note that the diffs that git shows you are completely unrelated to the deltas it uses to compress it's database - which are always "binary deltas" and not line-based diffs.

Also I'm not sure why you mean that db corruption possibility has something to do with whether or not it stores diffs?