I wrote git-bigstore [0] almost 10 (!) years ago to solve this problem—even before Git LFS—and as far as I know, bigstore still works perfectly.
You specify the files you want to store in your storage backend via .gitattributes, and use two separate commands to sync files. I have not touched this code in years but the general implementation should still work.
GitHub launched LFS not too long after I wrote this, so I kind of gave up on the idea thinking that no one would want to use it in lieu of GitHub's solution, but based on the comments I think there's a place for it.
It needs some love but the idea is solid. I wrote a little description on the wiki about the low-level implementation if you want to check it out. [1]
Also, all of the metadata is stored using git notes, so is completely portable and is frontend agnostic—doesn't lock you into anything (except, of course, the storage backend you use).
> Large object promisors are special Git remotes that only house large files.
I like this approach. If I could configure my repos to use something like S3, I would switch away from using LFS. S3 seems like a really good synergy for large blobs in a VCS. The intelligent tiering feature can move data into colder tiers of storage as history naturally accumulates and old things are forgotten. I wouldn't mind a historical checkout taking half a day (i.e., restored from a robotic tape library) if I am pulling in stuff from a decade ago.
The article mentions alternatives to git lfs like git annex that support S3 already (which IMHO is however still a bit of a pain in the ass on windows due to the symlink workflow). Also dvc plays nicely with git and S3. Gitlab btw also simply offloads git lfs to S3. All have their quirks. I typically opt for LFS as a no-brainer but use the others when it fits the workflow and the infrastructure requirements.
Edit: Particularly the hash algorithm and the change detection (also when this happens) makes a difference if you have 2 GB files and not only the 25MB file from the OP
At my current job I've started caching all of our LFS objects in a bucket, for cost reasons. Every time a PR is run, I get the list of objects via `git lfs ls-files`, sync them from gcp, run `git lfs checkout` to actually populate the repo from the object store, and then `git lfs pull` to pick up anything not cached. If there were uncached objects, I push them back up via `gcloud storage rsync`. Simple, doesn't require any configuration for developers (who only ever have to pull new objects), keeps the Github UI unconfused about the state of the repo.
I'd initially at spinning up an LFS backends, but this solves the main pain point, for now. Github was charging us an arm and a leg for pulling LFS files for CI, because each checkout is fresh, the caching model is non-ideal (max 10GB cache, impossible to share between branches), so we end up pulling a bunch of data that is unfortunately in LFS, every commit, possibly multiple times. Because of this they happily charge us for all that bandwidth, because they don't provide tools to make it easy to reduce bandwidth (let me pay for more cache size, or warm workers with an entire cache disc, or better cache control, or...).
...and if I want to enable this for developers it's relatively easy, just add a new git hook to do the same set of operations locally.
We use a somewhat similar approach in RWX when pulling LFS files[1]. We run `git lfs ls-files` to get a list of the lfs files, then pass that list into a task which pulls each file from the LFS endpoint using curl. Since in RWX the output of tasks are cached as long as their inputs don't change, the LFS files just stay in the RWX cache and are pulled from there on future clones in CI. In addition to saving on GitHub's LFS bandwidth costs, the RWX cache is also _much_ faster to restore from than `git lfs pull`.
Why not run some open source ci locally or the google equivalent ec2, if you’re already going to the trouble of this much customization with running GitHub ci?
You can install your own S3 compatible storage system on premises. It can be anything from a simple daemon (Scality, JuiceFS) to a small appliance (TrueNAS) to a full-blown storage cluster (Ceph). OpenStack has it own object storage service (Swift).
If you fancy it for your datacenter, big players (Fujitsu, Lenovo, Huawei, HPE) will happily sell you "object storage" systems which also support S3 at very high speeds.
Yes, S3 is the name of Amazon Object Storage Service. Various players in the industry have started offering solutions with a compatible API which some people abusively call S3 too.
TFA asserts that Git LFS is bad for several reasons including because proprietary with vendor lock-in which I don't think is fair to claim. GitHub provided an open client and server which negates that.
LFS does break disconnected/offline/sneakernet operations which wasn't mentioned and is not awesome, but those are niche workflows. It sounds like that would also be broken with promisors.
The `git partial clone` examples are cool!
The description of Large Object Promisors makes it sound like they take the client-side complexity in LFS, move it server-side, and then increases the complexity? Instead of the client uploading to a git server and to a LFS server it uploads to a git server which in turn uploads to an object store, but the client will download directly from the object store? Obviously different tradeoffs there. I'm curious how often people will get bit by uploading to public git servers which upload to hidden promisor remotes.
LFS is bad. The server implementations suck. It conflates object contents with the storage method. It's opt-in, in a terrible way - if you do the obvious thing you get tiny text files instead of the files you actually want.
I dunno if their solution is any better but it's fairly unarguable that LFS is bad.
It does seem like this proposal has exactly the same issue. Unless this new method blocks cloning when unable to access the promisors, you'll end up with similar problems of broken large files.
> LFS does break disconnected/offline/sneakernet operations which wasn't mentioned and is not awesome
Yea, I had the same thought. And TBD on large object promisors.
Git annex is somewhat more decentralized as it can track the presence of large files across different remotes. And it can pull large files from filesystem repos such as USB drives. The downside is that it's much more complicated and difficult to use. Some code forges used to support it, but support has since been dropped.
Another way that LFS is bad, as I recently discovered, is that the migration will pollute the `.gitattributes` of ancestor commits that do not contain the LFS objects.
In other words, if you migrate a repo that has commits A->B->C, and C adds the large files, then commits A & B will gain a `.gitattributes` referring to the large files that do not exist in A & B.
This is because the migration function will carry its ~gitattributes structure backwards as it walks the history, for caching purposes, and not cross-reference it against the current commit.
Git LFS didn't work with SSH, you had to get an SSL cert which github knew was a barrier for people self hosting at home. I think gitlab got it patched for SSH finally though.
> High vendor lock-in – When GitHub wrote Git LFS, the other large file systems—Git Fat, Git Annex, and Git Media—were agnostic about the server-side. But GitHub locked users to their proprietary server implementation and charged folks to use it.
Is this a current issue?
I used Git LFS with a GitLab instance this week, seemed to work fine.
At the same time it feels odd to hear mentions of LFS being deprecated in the future, while I’ve seldom seen anyone even use it - people just don’t seem to care and shove images and such into regular Git which puzzles me.
This article treats LFS unfairly. It does not in any way lock you in to GitHub; the protocol is open. The downsides of LFS are unavoidable as a Git extension. Promisors are basically the same concept as LFS, except as it's built into Git it is able to provide a better UX than is possible as an extension.
Using LFS once in a repository locks you in permanently. You actually have to delete the repository from GitHub to remove the space consumed. It’s entirely a non-starter.
Nowhere is this behavior explicitly stated.
I used to use Git LFS on GitHub to do my company’s study on GitHub statistics because we stored large compressed databases on users and repositories.
This conflates Git and Github. Github is crap, news at 11. Git itself is fine and LFS is an extension for Git. There is nothing in LFS spec that discusses storage billing. Anyone can write a better server
Even ancient svn works much better out of the box for large binary files than git (e.g. a 150 GB working directory with many big Photoshop files and other binary assets is no problem in SVN).
What does SVN do differently than git when it comes to large binary files, and why can't git use the same approach?
I also don't quite understand tbh how offloading large files to somewhere else would be fundamentally different than storing all files in one place except complicating everything? Storage is storage, how would a different storage location fix any of the current performance and robustness problems? Offloading just sounds like a solution for public git forges which don't want to deal with big files because it's too costly for them, but increased hosting cost is not the 'large binary file problem' of git.
(edit: apparently git supports proper locking(?) so I removed that section - ps: nvm it looks like the file locking feature is only in git-lfs)
You should look into how git is architected to support a lot of features SVN doesn't (distributed repos is a big one). When you clone a git repo you clone the full file history. This is trivial for text but can be extremely large for binary files.
Storage is not storage as you can store things as copies or diffs (and a million other ways). For code, diffs are efficient but for binaries, diffs approach double the size of the original files, simply sending/storing the full file is better.
These differences have big effects on how git operates and many design choices assumed diffable text assets only.
If you do a little research, there's plenty of information on the topic.
Completely different design. Git is intended to be fully distributed, so (a) every repo is supposed to have the full history of every file, and (b) locking is meaningless.
People should use the VCS that's appropriate for their project rather than insist on git everywhere.
> People should use the VCS that's appropriate for their project rather than insist on git everywhere.
A lot of people don't seem to realise this. I work in game dev and SVN or Perforce are far far better than Git for source control in this space.
In AA game dev a checkout (not the complete history, not the source art files) can easily get to 300GB of binary data. This is really pushing Subversion to it's limits.
In AAA gamedev you are looking at a full checkout of the latest assets (not the complete history, not the source art files) of at least 1TB and 2TB is becoming more and more common. The whole repo can easily come in at 100 TB. At this scale Perforce is really the only game in town (and they know this and charge through the nose for it).
In the movie industry you can multiply AAA gamedev by ~10.
Git has no hope of working at this scale as much as I'd like it to.
> People should use the VCS that's appropriate for their project rather than insist on git everywhere.
Disagree. I really like the "de-facto standard" that git has become for open source. It means if I want to understand some new project's source code, there is one less hassle for me to deal with: I don't need to learn any new concepts just to access the source code and all the tooling is already right there.
The situation we have with package managers, dependency managers and package managers for package managers is worse enough. I really don't want a world in which every language or every project also comes with its own version control system and remote repo infrastructure.
> People should use the VCS that's appropriate for their project rather than insist on git everywhere.
But git is likely to be appropriate almost everywhere. You won’t just use svn just for big file purposes while git is better for everything else in the same project
Which is kinda funny because most people use git through Github or Gitlab, e.g. forcing git back into a centralized model ;)
> People should use the VCS that's appropriate for their project rather than insist on git everywhere.
Indeed, but I think that train has left long ago :)
I had to look it up after I wrote that paragraph about locking, but it looks like file locking is supported in Git (just weird that I need to press a button in the Gitlab UI to lock a file:
I'm really happy to see large file support in Git core. Any external solution would have similar opt-in procedures. I really wanted it to work seamlessly with as few extra commands as possible, so the API was constrained to the smudge and clean filters in the '.gitattributes' file.
Though I did work hard to remove any vendor lock-in by working directly with Atlassian and Microsoft pretty early in the process. It was a great working relationship, with a lot of help from Atlassian in particular on the file locking API. LFS shipped open source with compatible support in 3 separate git hosts.
What I used to recommend to my sofware engineering classes is that instead of putting large files (media etc) into Git, put them into the artifact repository (Artifactory or something like it). That lets you for instance publish it as a snapshot dependency that the build system will automatically fetch for you, but control how much history of it you keep and only require your colleagues to fetch the latest version. Even better, a simple clean of their build system cache will free up the space used by old versions on their machines.
People like storing everything in git because it significantly simplifies configuration management. A build can be cleanly linked to a git hash instead of being a hash and a bunch of artifacts versions especially if you vendor your dependencies in your source control and completely stop using an artifact repository.
With a good build system using a shared cache, it makes for a very pleasant development environment.
It sounds like a submodule... But certainly if the problem could be solved with a submodule, people would have found out long ago. Git's submodules also support shallow-cloning already [1]. I can only guess what the issues are with large files since I didn't face it myself - I deal with pure source code most of the times. I'm interested to know why it would be a bad idea to do that, just in case. The caveats pointed out in the second SO answer don't seem to be a big deal.
This has its own issues. Now you need to provision additional credentials into your CI/CD and to your developers.
Commits become multi-step, as you need to first commit the artifacts to get their artifact IDs to put in the repo. You can automate that via git hooks, but then you're back at where you started: git-lfs.
While git LFS is just a kludge for now, writing a filter argument during the clone operation is not the long-term solution either.
Git clone is the very first command most people will run when learning how to use git. Emphasized for effect: the very first command.
Will they remember to write the filter? Maybe, if the tutorial to the cool codebase they're trying to access mentions it. Maybe not. What happens if they don't? It may take a long time without any obvious indication. And if they do? The cloned repo might not be compilable/usable since the blobs are missing.
Say they do get it right. Will they understand it? Most likely not. We are exposing the inner workings of git on the very first command they learn. What's a blob? Why do I need to filter on it? Where are blobs stored? It's classic abstraction leakage.
This is a solved problem: Rsync does it. Just port the bloody implementation over. It does mean supporting alternative representations or moving away from blobs altogether, which git maintainers seem unwilling to do.
I totally agree. This follows a long tradition of Git "fixing" things by adding a flag that 99% of users won't ever discover. They never fix the defaults.
And yes, you can fix defaults without breaking backwards compatibility.
Can you explain what the solution is? I don't mean the details of the rsync algorithm, but rather what it would like like from the users' perspective. What files are on your local filesystem when you do a "git clone"?
When you do a shallow clone, no files would be present. However when doing a full clone you’ll get a full copy of each version of each blob, and what is being suggested is treat each revision as an rsync operation upon the last. And the more times you muck with a file, which can happen a lot both with assets and if you check in your deps to get exact snapshotting of code, that’s a lot of big file churn.
Would it be incorrect to say that most of the bloat relates to historical revisions? If so, maybe an rsync-like behavior starting with the most current version of the files would be the best starting point. (Which is all most people will need anyhow.)
> Would it be incorrect to say that most of the bloat relates to historical revisions?
Based on my experience (YMMV), I think it is incorrect, yes, because any time I've performed a shallow clone of a repository, the saving wasn't as much as one would intuitively imagine (in other words: history is stored very efficiently).
What? Why would you want to expose a beginner to waiting 10 minutes unnecessarily. How would they even know what they did wrong or what's a reasonable time to wait, ask chatgpt "why is my git clone taking 10 minutes"?!
Is this really the best we can do in terms of user experience? No. git need to step up.
It is a solution. The fact beginners might not understand it doesn't really matter, solutions need not perish on that alone. Clone is a command people usually run once while setting up a repository. Maybe the case could be made that this behavior should be the default and that full clones should be opt-in but that's a separate issue.
We're working on `oxen` to solve a lot of the problems we ran into with git or git-lfs.
We have an open source CLI and server that mirrors git, but handles large files and mono repos with millions of files in a much more performant manner. Would love feedback if you want to check it out!
How about git just fixes shallow clones and partial clones? Then we don't need convoluted work arounds to cheat in large content after we fully clone a history of pointers or promises or whatever. You should be able to set default clone depth by file type and size in the git attributes (or maybe a file that can also live above a repo like supporting attributes in .gitconfig locations?).
Then the usual settings would be to shallow clone the latest content as well as fetch the full history and maybe the text file historical content. Ideally you could prune to the clone depth settings as well.
Why are we still talking about large file pointers? If you fix shallow and partial clones, then any repo can be an efficient file mirror, right?
I've been using git + git-lfs to manage, sync and backup all my files (including media files and more) and it's quite convenient, but native support for large files would be great. I'd for example really like to be able to push large objects directly from one device to the next.
At the moment I'm using my own git server + git lfs deduplication using btrfs to efficiently handle the large files.
If large objects are just embedded in various packfiles this approach would no longer work, so I hope that such a behaviour can be controlled.
I guess maybe it’s the nonstandard sMEL chunk that bumps the size of the PNG file up so high. Seemed more to me that they were talking about an image of random noise though.
For what it's worth, I have a self hosted git forge where I upped the maximum filesize limit. I use git repositories for my science projects, they can each have hundreds of large files (> 25 Mb as described in the article).
I don't use LFS, I don't encounter any issue.
Something they missed out with the GitLFS cons is authentication, if you don't use SSH-agent, pushing involves authenticating multiple times, sometimes more than 2-3 times in my experience.
But it's not intended for or good at (without forcing a square peg into a round hole) the sort of thing LFS and promisors are for, which is a public project with binary assets.
git-annex is really for (and shines at) a private backup solution where you'd like to have N copies of some data around on various storage devices, track the history of each copy, ensure that you have at least N copies etc.
Each repository gets a UUID, and each tracked file has a SHA-256 hash. There's a branch which has a timestamp and repo UUID to SHA-256 mapping, if you have 10 repos that file will have (at least) 10 entries.
You can "trust" different repositories to different degrees, e.g. if you're storing a file on both some RAID'd storage server, or an old portable HD you're keeping in a desk drawer.
This really doesn't scale for a public project. E.g. I have a repository that I back up my photos and videos in, that repository has ~700 commits, and ~6000 commits to the metadata "git-annex" branch, pretty close to a 1:10 ratio.
There's an exhaustive history of every file movement that's ever occurred on the 10 storage devices I've ever used for that repository. Now imagine doing all that on a project used by more than one person.
All other solutions to tracking large files along with a git repository forgo all this complexity in favor of basically saying "just get the rest where you cloned me from, they'll have it!".
> Any ideas why it isn’t more popular and more well known?
While git-annex works very well on Unix-style systems with Unix-style filesystems, it heavily depends on symbolic links, which do not exist on filesystems like exFAT, and are problematic on Windows (AFAIK, you have to be an administrator, or enable an obscure group policy). It has a degraded mode for these filesystems, but uses twice the disk space in that mode, and AFAIK loses some features.
The git storage model also needs an overhaul to be more like modern backup tools such as restic/borg; it needs content-defined chunking of files and directories.
I'm just dipping my toe into Data Version Control - DVC. It is aimed towards data science and large digital asset management using configurable storage sources under a git meta layer. The goal is separation of concerns: git is used for versioning and the storage layers are dumb storage.
Does anyone have feedback about personally using DVC vs LFS?
We built `oxen` to solve the issues we (and many others) had with DVC and LFS. The highlights: open source cli and server, mirrors git for easy learning, handles large files and millions of files, performant af. Would love feedback if you check it out.
I'm in the same boat - I decided this week for DVC over LFS.
For me, the deciding factor was that with LFS, if you want to delete objects from storage, you have to rewrite git history. At least, that's what both the Github and Gitlab docs specify.
DVC adds a layer of indirection, so that its structure is not directly tied to git. If I change my mind and delete the objects from S3, dvc might stop working, but git will be fine.
Some extra pluses about DVC:
- It can point to versioned S3 objects that you might already have as part of existing data pipelines.
- It integrates with the Python fsspec library to read the files on demand using paths like "dvc://path/to/file.parquet". This feels nicer than needing to download all the files up front.
I did a simple test tracking a few hundred gigs of random /dev/urandom data. LFS choked on upload speed while DVC worked fine. My team is using DVC now
My main complaint about DVC is that it's hard to manage the files and if you keep modifying a big file you are going to end up with all the revisions stored in S3 (or whichever storage you choose). This is by design but I wish it was easier to set up like "store only the latest 3 revisions"
So this filter argument will reduce the repo size when cloning, but how will one reduce the repo size after a long stint of local commits of changing binary assets? Delete the repo and clone again?
It's really not clear which behaviour you want though. For example when you do lots of bisects you probably want to keep everything downloaded locally. If you're just working on new things, you may want to prune the old blobs. This information only exists in your head though.
yeah, this isn't really solving the problem. It's just punting it. While I welcome a short-circuit filter, I see dragons ahead. Dependencies. Assets. Models... won't benefit at all as these repos need the large files - hence why there are large files.
There seems to be a misunderstanding. The --filter option simple doesn't populate content in the .git directory which is not required for the checkout. If there is a file that is large which is needed for the current checkout (ie the parts not in the .git folder), it will be fetched regardless of the filter option.
To put it another way, regardless of what max size you give to --filter, you will end up with a complete git checkout, no missing files.
It’s definitely not a full solution, but it seems like it would solve cases where having the full history of the large files available, just not on everyone’s machine, is the desired behavior.
Is the problem that we don't have good "diff" equivalents for binaries that git could use to only store those diffs like the old RCS/CVS for large files?
Not really. Git does use delta-based storage for binary files. It might not be as good as it could be for some files (e.g. compressed ones) but that's relatively easy to solve.
The real problem is that Git wants you to have a full copy of all files that have ever existed in the repo. As soon as you add a large file to a repo it's there forever and can basically never be removed. If you keep editing it you'll build up lots more permanent data in the repo.
Git is really missing:
1. A way to delete old data.
2. A way for the repo to indicate which data is probably not needed (old large binaries).
3. A way to serve large files efficiently (from a CDN).
Some of these can sort of be done, but it's super janky. You have to proactively add confusing flags etc.
subversion used to do that, actually probably still does... and also only checks out the latest revision. Svn is a bother in other ways of course, like being worse at regular version control, and only usable with access to the server etc.
There's a bunch of binary files that change a lot on small changes due to compression or how the data is serialised, so the problem doesn't go away completely. One could conceivably start handling that, but there are lots of file formats out there and the sum oc complexity tends to be bugs and security issues.
Potentially with a new blob type but maintaining a reverse diff would be difficult as it would change the hash of the previous version if you had to store the diff.
Another alternative would be storing the chunks as blobs so that you reconstruct the full binary and only have to store the changed chunks. However that doesn't work with compressed binaries.
I was just using git LFS and was very concerned with how bad the help message was compared to the rest of git. I know it seems small, but it just never felt like a team player, and now I'm very happy to hear this.
Is Git ever going to get proper support for binary files?
I’ve never used it for anything serious but my understanding is that Mercurial handles binary files better? Like it supports binary diffs if I understand correctly.
I would think that git would need a parallel storage scheme for binaries. Something that does binary chunking and deduplication between revisions, but keeps the same merkle referencing scheme as everything else.
> for storing images or MP3s, binary diffs are usually worse than nothing
Editing the ID3 tag of an MP3 file or changing the rating metadata of an image will give a big advantage to block level deduplication. Only a few such cases are needed to more than compensate for that worse than nothing inefficiencies of binary diffs when there's nothing to deduplicate.
I didn't enjoy using Plastic, but Perforce is ok (not to say that it's perfect - I miss a lot of git stuff). It does have no problems with lots of data though! This article moans about the overhead of a 25 MB png file... it's been a long time since i worked on a serious project where the head revision is less than 25 GB. Typical daily churn would be 2.5 GB+.
(It's been even longer since i used svn in anger, but maybe it could work too. It has file locking, and local storage cost is proportional to size of head revision. It was manageable enough with a 2 GB head revision. Metadata access speed was always terrible though, which was tedious.)
My understanding is that git diff algorithms require a file to be segmentable (eg text files are split line-wise) and there is no general segmentation strategy for binary blobs.
But a good segmentation is only good for better compression and nicer diff, git could do byte wise diffs with no issues, so I wonder why doesn't git use customizable segmentation strategies where it calls external tools based on file type (eg a rust thingy for rust file etc, or a PNG thingy for PNG files).
At worst the tool would return either a single segment for the entire file or the byte wise split which would work anyway
A common misconception. git has always used binary deltas for pack files. Consider that git tree objects are themselves not text files, and git needs efficiently store slightly modified versions of the same tree.
Git has always handled large (including large binary) files just fine.
What it doesn't like is files where a conceptually minor change changes the entire file, for example compressed or encrypted files.
The only somewhat valid complaint is that if someone once committed a large file and then it was later deleted (maybe minutes later, maybe years later) then it is in the repo and in everyone's checkouts forever. Which applies equally to small and to large files, but large ones have more impact.
That's the whole point of a version control system. To preserve the history, allowing earlier versions to be recreated.
The better solution would be to have better review of changes pushed to the master repo, including having unreviewed changes in separate, potentially sacrificial, repos until approved.
https://github.com/oneconcern/datamon
Had written this git for data tool few years back (works with GCS but can be made to work with S3)
1. No server side
2. Immutable data (via GCS policies)
3. Ability to mount data sets as filesystems
4. Integrated with k8s.
It was built to work for the needs of the startup funding it, but I would love it if it could be extended.
Have you tried Oxen.ai? they are doing more fine-tuning and inference now but they have an open-source data version control platform written in rust at the core of their product.
Partial clones are also dependent on the server side supporting this. GitHub is one of the very few that does. git.kernel.org for eg did not, last I checked.
What I would love to see in an SCM that properly supports large binary blobs is storing the contents using Prolly trees instead of a simple SHA hash.
Prolly trees are very similar to Merkle trees or the rsync algorithm, but they support mutation and version history retention with some nice properties. For example: you always obtain exactly the same tree (with the same root hash) irrespective of the order of incremental edit operations used to get to the same state.
In other words, two users could edit a subset of a 1 TB file, both could merge their edits, and both will then agree on the root hash without having to re-hash or even download the entire file!
Another major advantage on modern many-core CPUs is that Prolly trees can be constructed in parallel instead of having to be streamed sequentially on one thread.
Then the really big brained move is to store the entire SCM repo as a single Prolly tree for efficient incremental downloads, merges, or whatever. I.e.: a repo fork could share storage with the original not just up to the point-in-time of the fork, but all future changes too.
Git has had a good run. Maybe it’s time for a new system built by someone who learned about DX early in their career, instead of via their own bug database.
If there’s a new algorithm out there that warrants a look…
Can you list some realistic workflows where people would be touching the same huge file but only changing much smaller parts of it?
And yes you can represent a whole repo as a giant tar file, but because the boundaries between hash segments won't line up with your file boundaries you get an efficiency hit with very little benefit. Unless you make it file-aware in which case it ends up even closer to what git already does.
Git knows how to store deltas between files. Making that mechanism more reliable is probably able to achieve more with less.
git works just fine with large files. The problem is that when you clone a repo, or pull, by default it gets everything, including large files deep in the history that you probably don't care about anymore.
That was actually an initial selling point of git: you have the full history locally. You can work from the plane/train/deserted island just fine.
These large files will persist in the repo forever. So people look for options to segregate large files out so that they only get downloaded on demand (aka "lazily").
All the existing options (submodules, LFS, partial clones) are different answers to "how do we make certain files only download on demand"
IIRC, it take ages for it to index a large folder. I was trying to use it to store the diff of my backup folder that constantly get rclone'd and rsync'd over in case those fucked up catastrophically
As it should be! If it's not native to git, it's not worth using. I'm glad these issues are finally being solved.
These new features are pretty awesome too. Especially separate large object remotes. They will probably enable git to be used for even more things than it's already being used for. They will enable new ways to work with git.
May I humbly suggest that those files probably belong in an LFS submodule called "assets" or "vendor"?
Then you can clone without checking out all the unnecessary large files to get a working build, This also helps on the legal side to correctly license your repos.
I'm struggling to see how this is a problem with git and not just antipatterns that arise from badly organized projects.
The problem I've run into with this is that those files stay in the history. Your git clones will get ridiculous, and you'll blast through any git repo size limits that you might have.
I just want my files to match what's expected when I pull a commit, that doesn't require some literal "commit build system" and "pull build system". Coming from perforce and SVN, I can't comprehend why git it so popular, beyond cargo cult. It's completely nonsensical to think that software is just source.
The user shouldn't have to think about such a thing. Version control should handle everything automatically and not force the user into doing extra work to workaround issues.
I always hated the “write your code like the next maintainer is a psychopath” mantra because it makes the goal unclear. I prefer the following:
Write your code/tools as if they will be used at 2:00 am while the server room is on fire. Because sooner or later they will be.
A lot of our processes are used like emergency procedures. Emergency procedures are meant to be brainless as much as possible. So you can reserve the rest of your capacity for the actual problem. My version essentially calls out Kernighan’s Law.
Organizing your files sensibly is not necessary to use LFS nor is it a "workaround". It's just a pattern I am suggesting to make life easier regardless of what tools you decide to use. I can't think of a case where organizing your project to fail gracefully is a bad idea.
Git does the responsible thing and lets the user determine how to proceed with the mess they've made.
I must say I'm increasingly suspicious of the hate that git receives these days.
Git is fundamentally broken and bad. Almost all projects are defacto centralized. Your project is not Linux.
A good version control system would support petabyte scale history and terabyte scale clones via sparse virtual filesystem.
Git’s design is just bad for almost all projects that aren’t Linux.
(I know this will get downvoted. But most modern programmers have never used anything but Git and so they don’t realize their tool is actually quite bad! It’s a shame.)
> A good version control system would support petabyte scale history and terabyte scale clones via sparse virtual filesystem.
I like this idea in principle but I always wonder what that would look in practice, outside a FAANG company: How do you ensure the virtual file system works equally well on all platforms, without root access, possibly even inside containers? How do you ensure it's fast? What do you do in case of network errors?
Yeah we're at the CVS stage where everyone uses it because everyone uses it.
But most people don't need most of its features and many people need features it doesn't have.
If you look up git worktrees, you'll find a lot of blog articles referring to worktrees as a "secret weapon" or similar. So git's secret weapon is a mode that lets you work around the ugliness of branches. This suggests that many people would be better suited by an SCM that isn't branch-based.
It's nice having the full history offline. But the scaling problems force people to adopt a workflow where they have a large number of small git repos instead of keeping the history of related things together. I think there are better designs out there for the typical open source project.
I don't understand what you mean by "the ugliness of branches".
In my experience, branches are totally awesome. Worktrees make branches even more awesome because they let me check out multiple branches at once to separate directories.
The only way it could get better is if it somehow gains the ability to check out the same branch to multiple different directories at once.
Completely disagree. Git is fundamentally functional and good. All projects are local and decentralized, and any "centralization" is in fact just git hosting services, of which there are many options which are not even mutually exclusive.
Got works fine and is solid and well enough known to be a reasonable choice for most people.
But I encourage everyone to try out a few alternatives (and adopt their workflows at least for a while). I have no idea if you have or not.
But fine has never used the alternatives, one doesn’t really know just how nice things can be. Or, even if you still find fit to be your preferred can, having an alternative experience can open you to other possibilities and ways of working.
Just like everyone should try a couple of different programming languages or editors or anything else for size. You may not end up choosing it, but seeing the possibilities and different ways of thinking is a very good thing.
It is insane that almost after a century of running computations with data on computers we still don't have a good version control system that maps a code version to its relevant data version.
Still the approach is to put code and data in a folder and call it a day. Slap a "_FINAL" at the folder name and you are golden.
We had a repo that was at one point 25GB. It had Git LFS turned on but the files weren’t stored outside of BitBucket. Whenever a build was run in Bamboo, it would choke big time.
We found that we could move the large files to Artifactory as it has Git LFS support.
But the problem was the entire history that did not have Artifactory pointers. Every clone included the large files (for some reason the filter functionality wouldn’t work for us - it was a large repo and it it had hundreds of users amongst other problems)
Anyways what we ended up doing was closing that repo and opening a new one with the large files stripped.
Nitpick in the authors page:
“ Nowadays, there’s a free tier, but you’re dependent on the whims of GitHub to set pricing. Today, a 50GB repo on GitHub will cost $40/year for storage”
This is not true as you don’t need GitHub to get LFS support
I wrote git-bigstore [0] almost 10 (!) years ago to solve this problem—even before Git LFS—and as far as I know, bigstore still works perfectly.
You specify the files you want to store in your storage backend via .gitattributes, and use two separate commands to sync files. I have not touched this code in years but the general implementation should still work.
GitHub launched LFS not too long after I wrote this, so I kind of gave up on the idea thinking that no one would want to use it in lieu of GitHub's solution, but based on the comments I think there's a place for it.
It needs some love but the idea is solid. I wrote a little description on the wiki about the low-level implementation if you want to check it out. [1]
Also, all of the metadata is stored using git notes, so is completely portable and is frontend agnostic—doesn't lock you into anything (except, of course, the storage backend you use).
[0]: https://github.com/lionheart/git-bigstore
[1]: https://github.com/lionheart/git-bigstore/wiki
> Large object promisors are special Git remotes that only house large files.
I like this approach. If I could configure my repos to use something like S3, I would switch away from using LFS. S3 seems like a really good synergy for large blobs in a VCS. The intelligent tiering feature can move data into colder tiers of storage as history naturally accumulates and old things are forgotten. I wouldn't mind a historical checkout taking half a day (i.e., restored from a robotic tape library) if I am pulling in stuff from a decade ago.
The article mentions alternatives to git lfs like git annex that support S3 already (which IMHO is however still a bit of a pain in the ass on windows due to the symlink workflow). Also dvc plays nicely with git and S3. Gitlab btw also simply offloads git lfs to S3. All have their quirks. I typically opt for LFS as a no-brainer but use the others when it fits the workflow and the infrastructure requirements.
Edit: Particularly the hash algorithm and the change detection (also when this happens) makes a difference if you have 2 GB files and not only the 25MB file from the OP
At my current job I've started caching all of our LFS objects in a bucket, for cost reasons. Every time a PR is run, I get the list of objects via `git lfs ls-files`, sync them from gcp, run `git lfs checkout` to actually populate the repo from the object store, and then `git lfs pull` to pick up anything not cached. If there were uncached objects, I push them back up via `gcloud storage rsync`. Simple, doesn't require any configuration for developers (who only ever have to pull new objects), keeps the Github UI unconfused about the state of the repo.
I'd initially at spinning up an LFS backends, but this solves the main pain point, for now. Github was charging us an arm and a leg for pulling LFS files for CI, because each checkout is fresh, the caching model is non-ideal (max 10GB cache, impossible to share between branches), so we end up pulling a bunch of data that is unfortunately in LFS, every commit, possibly multiple times. Because of this they happily charge us for all that bandwidth, because they don't provide tools to make it easy to reduce bandwidth (let me pay for more cache size, or warm workers with an entire cache disc, or better cache control, or...).
...and if I want to enable this for developers it's relatively easy, just add a new git hook to do the same set of operations locally.
We use a somewhat similar approach in RWX when pulling LFS files[1]. We run `git lfs ls-files` to get a list of the lfs files, then pass that list into a task which pulls each file from the LFS endpoint using curl. Since in RWX the output of tasks are cached as long as their inputs don't change, the LFS files just stay in the RWX cache and are pulled from there on future clones in CI. In addition to saving on GitHub's LFS bandwidth costs, the RWX cache is also _much_ faster to restore from than `git lfs pull`.
[1] https://github.com/rwx-cloud/packages/blob/main/git/clone/bi...
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Why not run some open source ci locally or the google equivalent ec2, if you’re already going to the trouble of this much customization with running GitHub ci?
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> let me pay for more cache size
Apparently, this is coming in Q3 according to their public roadmap: https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/1029
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Same and never understood why it wasn't the default from the get go but maybe it wasn't so synonymous when it first came out.
I run a small git LFS server because of this and will be happy to switch away the second I can get git to natively support S3.
I'm currently running https://github.com/datopian/giftless to store the LFS files belonging to repos I have on GitHub on my homelab miniio instance.
There are a couple other projects that bridge S3 and LFS, though I had the most success with this setup.
Is S3 related to Amazon?
You can install your own S3 compatible storage system on premises. It can be anything from a simple daemon (Scality, JuiceFS) to a small appliance (TrueNAS) to a full-blown storage cluster (Ceph). OpenStack has it own object storage service (Swift).
If you fancy it for your datacenter, big players (Fujitsu, Lenovo, Huawei, HPE) will happily sell you "object storage" systems which also support S3 at very high speeds.
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Yeah it's AWS's 'cloud storage service'.
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Yes, S3 is the name of Amazon Object Storage Service. Various players in the industry have started offering solutions with a compatible API which some people abusively call S3 too.
TFA asserts that Git LFS is bad for several reasons including because proprietary with vendor lock-in which I don't think is fair to claim. GitHub provided an open client and server which negates that.
LFS does break disconnected/offline/sneakernet operations which wasn't mentioned and is not awesome, but those are niche workflows. It sounds like that would also be broken with promisors.
The `git partial clone` examples are cool!
The description of Large Object Promisors makes it sound like they take the client-side complexity in LFS, move it server-side, and then increases the complexity? Instead of the client uploading to a git server and to a LFS server it uploads to a git server which in turn uploads to an object store, but the client will download directly from the object store? Obviously different tradeoffs there. I'm curious how often people will get bit by uploading to public git servers which upload to hidden promisor remotes.
LFS is bad. The server implementations suck. It conflates object contents with the storage method. It's opt-in, in a terrible way - if you do the obvious thing you get tiny text files instead of the files you actually want.
I dunno if their solution is any better but it's fairly unarguable that LFS is bad.
It does seem like this proposal has exactly the same issue. Unless this new method blocks cloning when unable to access the promisors, you'll end up with similar problems of broken large files.
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I think maybe not storing large files in repo but managing those separately.
Mostly I did not run into such use case but in general I don’t see any upsides trying to shove some big files together with code within repositories.
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> LFS does break disconnected/offline/sneakernet operations which wasn't mentioned and is not awesome
Yea, I had the same thought. And TBD on large object promisors.
Git annex is somewhat more decentralized as it can track the presence of large files across different remotes. And it can pull large files from filesystem repos such as USB drives. The downside is that it's much more complicated and difficult to use. Some code forges used to support it, but support has since been dropped.
Another way that LFS is bad, as I recently discovered, is that the migration will pollute the `.gitattributes` of ancestor commits that do not contain the LFS objects.
In other words, if you migrate a repo that has commits A->B->C, and C adds the large files, then commits A & B will gain a `.gitattributes` referring to the large files that do not exist in A & B.
This is because the migration function will carry its ~gitattributes structure backwards as it walks the history, for caching purposes, and not cross-reference it against the current commit.
That doesn't sound right. There's no way it's adding a file to previous commits, that would change the hash and thereby break a lot of things.
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Git LFS didn't work with SSH, you had to get an SSL cert which github knew was a barrier for people self hosting at home. I think gitlab got it patched for SSH finally though.
letsencrypt launched 3 years before git-lfs
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> And the problems are significant:
> High vendor lock-in – When GitHub wrote Git LFS, the other large file systems—Git Fat, Git Annex, and Git Media—were agnostic about the server-side. But GitHub locked users to their proprietary server implementation and charged folks to use it.
Is this a current issue?
I used Git LFS with a GitLab instance this week, seemed to work fine.
https://docs.gitlab.com/topics/git/lfs/
I also used Git LFS with my Gitea instance a week before that, it was fine too.
https://docs.gitea.com/administration/git-lfs-setup
At the same time it feels odd to hear mentions of LFS being deprecated in the future, while I’ve seldom seen anyone even use it - people just don’t seem to care and shove images and such into regular Git which puzzles me.
This article treats LFS unfairly. It does not in any way lock you in to GitHub; the protocol is open. The downsides of LFS are unavoidable as a Git extension. Promisors are basically the same concept as LFS, except as it's built into Git it is able to provide a better UX than is possible as an extension.
Using LFS once in a repository locks you in permanently. You actually have to delete the repository from GitHub to remove the space consumed. It’s entirely a non-starter.
Nowhere is this behavior explicitly stated.
I used to use Git LFS on GitHub to do my company’s study on GitHub statistics because we stored large compressed databases on users and repositories.
This conflates Git and Github. Github is crap, news at 11. Git itself is fine and LFS is an extension for Git. There is nothing in LFS spec that discusses storage billing. Anyone can write a better server
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Even ancient svn works much better out of the box for large binary files than git (e.g. a 150 GB working directory with many big Photoshop files and other binary assets is no problem in SVN).
What does SVN do differently than git when it comes to large binary files, and why can't git use the same approach?
I also don't quite understand tbh how offloading large files to somewhere else would be fundamentally different than storing all files in one place except complicating everything? Storage is storage, how would a different storage location fix any of the current performance and robustness problems? Offloading just sounds like a solution for public git forges which don't want to deal with big files because it's too costly for them, but increased hosting cost is not the 'large binary file problem' of git.
(edit: apparently git supports proper locking(?) so I removed that section - ps: nvm it looks like the file locking feature is only in git-lfs)
You should look into how git is architected to support a lot of features SVN doesn't (distributed repos is a big one). When you clone a git repo you clone the full file history. This is trivial for text but can be extremely large for binary files.
Storage is not storage as you can store things as copies or diffs (and a million other ways). For code, diffs are efficient but for binaries, diffs approach double the size of the original files, simply sending/storing the full file is better.
These differences have big effects on how git operates and many design choices assumed diffable text assets only.
If you do a little research, there's plenty of information on the topic.
Completely different design. Git is intended to be fully distributed, so (a) every repo is supposed to have the full history of every file, and (b) locking is meaningless.
People should use the VCS that's appropriate for their project rather than insist on git everywhere.
> People should use the VCS that's appropriate for their project rather than insist on git everywhere.
A lot of people don't seem to realise this. I work in game dev and SVN or Perforce are far far better than Git for source control in this space.
In AA game dev a checkout (not the complete history, not the source art files) can easily get to 300GB of binary data. This is really pushing Subversion to it's limits.
In AAA gamedev you are looking at a full checkout of the latest assets (not the complete history, not the source art files) of at least 1TB and 2TB is becoming more and more common. The whole repo can easily come in at 100 TB. At this scale Perforce is really the only game in town (and they know this and charge through the nose for it).
In the movie industry you can multiply AAA gamedev by ~10.
Git has no hope of working at this scale as much as I'd like it to.
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> People should use the VCS that's appropriate for their project rather than insist on git everywhere.
Disagree. I really like the "de-facto standard" that git has become for open source. It means if I want to understand some new project's source code, there is one less hassle for me to deal with: I don't need to learn any new concepts just to access the source code and all the tooling is already right there.
The situation we have with package managers, dependency managers and package managers for package managers is worse enough. I really don't want a world in which every language or every project also comes with its own version control system and remote repo infrastructure.
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To be clear, "fully distributed" also means "can use all of the features offline, and without needing commit access to the central repository".
I can't imagine living without that feature, but I also do a lot of OSS work so I'm probably biased.
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> People should use the VCS that's appropriate for their project rather than insist on git everywhere.
But git is likely to be appropriate almost everywhere. You won’t just use svn just for big file purposes while git is better for everything else in the same project
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> Git is intended to be fully distributed
Which is kinda funny because most people use git through Github or Gitlab, e.g. forcing git back into a centralized model ;)
> People should use the VCS that's appropriate for their project rather than insist on git everywhere.
Indeed, but I think that train has left long ago :)
I had to look it up after I wrote that paragraph about locking, but it looks like file locking is supported in Git (just weird that I need to press a button in the Gitlab UI to lock a file:
https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/file_lock/
...and here it says it's only supported with git lfs (so still weird af):
https://docs.gitlab.com/topics/git/file_management/#file-loc...
...why not simply 'git lock [file]' and 'git push --locks' like it works with tags?
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I'm really happy to see large file support in Git core. Any external solution would have similar opt-in procedures. I really wanted it to work seamlessly with as few extra commands as possible, so the API was constrained to the smudge and clean filters in the '.gitattributes' file.
Though I did work hard to remove any vendor lock-in by working directly with Atlassian and Microsoft pretty early in the process. It was a great working relationship, with a lot of help from Atlassian in particular on the file locking API. LFS shipped open source with compatible support in 3 separate git hosts.
What I used to recommend to my sofware engineering classes is that instead of putting large files (media etc) into Git, put them into the artifact repository (Artifactory or something like it). That lets you for instance publish it as a snapshot dependency that the build system will automatically fetch for you, but control how much history of it you keep and only require your colleagues to fetch the latest version. Even better, a simple clean of their build system cache will free up the space used by old versions on their machines.
People like storing everything in git because it significantly simplifies configuration management. A build can be cleanly linked to a git hash instead of being a hash and a bunch of artifacts versions especially if you vendor your dependencies in your source control and completely stop using an artifact repository.
With a good build system using a shared cache, it makes for a very pleasant development environment.
It sounds like a submodule... But certainly if the problem could be solved with a submodule, people would have found out long ago. Git's submodules also support shallow-cloning already [1]. I can only guess what the issues are with large files since I didn't face it myself - I deal with pure source code most of the times. I'm interested to know why it would be a bad idea to do that, just in case. The caveats pointed out in the second SO answer don't seem to be a big deal.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2144406/how-to-make-shal...
It sounds different to me - a regular git submodule would keep all history, unlike a file storage with occasional snapshotting.
Do you teach CI/CD systems architecture in your classes? Because I am finding that is what the junior engineers that we have hired seem to be missing.
Tying it all in with GitLab, Artifactory, CodeSonar, Anchore etc
I think the OP refers to assets that truly belong in Git because they are source code but large, like 3d models.
Release artifacts like a .exe would NOT belong in Git because it is not source code.
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Yes
This has its own issues. Now you need to provision additional credentials into your CI/CD and to your developers.
Commits become multi-step, as you need to first commit the artifacts to get their artifact IDs to put in the repo. You can automate that via git hooks, but then you're back at where you started: git-lfs.
No. This is not a solution.
While git LFS is just a kludge for now, writing a filter argument during the clone operation is not the long-term solution either.
Git clone is the very first command most people will run when learning how to use git. Emphasized for effect: the very first command.
Will they remember to write the filter? Maybe, if the tutorial to the cool codebase they're trying to access mentions it. Maybe not. What happens if they don't? It may take a long time without any obvious indication. And if they do? The cloned repo might not be compilable/usable since the blobs are missing.
Say they do get it right. Will they understand it? Most likely not. We are exposing the inner workings of git on the very first command they learn. What's a blob? Why do I need to filter on it? Where are blobs stored? It's classic abstraction leakage.
This is a solved problem: Rsync does it. Just port the bloody implementation over. It does mean supporting alternative representations or moving away from blobs altogether, which git maintainers seem unwilling to do.
I totally agree. This follows a long tradition of Git "fixing" things by adding a flag that 99% of users won't ever discover. They never fix the defaults.
And yes, you can fix defaults without breaking backwards compatibility.
> They never fix the defaults
Not strictly true. They did change the default push behaviour from "matching" to "simple" in Git 2.0.
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> The cloned repo might not be compilable/usable since the blobs are missing.
Only the histories of the blobs are filtered out.
> This is a solved problem: Rsync does it.
Can you explain what the solution is? I don't mean the details of the rsync algorithm, but rather what it would like like from the users' perspective. What files are on your local filesystem when you do a "git clone"?
When you do a shallow clone, no files would be present. However when doing a full clone you’ll get a full copy of each version of each blob, and what is being suggested is treat each revision as an rsync operation upon the last. And the more times you muck with a file, which can happen a lot both with assets and if you check in your deps to get exact snapshotting of code, that’s a lot of big file churn.
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Exactly. If large files suck in git then that's because the git backend and cloning mechanism sucks for them. Fix that and then let us move on.
Would it be incorrect to say that most of the bloat relates to historical revisions? If so, maybe an rsync-like behavior starting with the most current version of the files would be the best starting point. (Which is all most people will need anyhow.)
> Would it be incorrect to say that most of the bloat relates to historical revisions?
Based on my experience (YMMV), I think it is incorrect, yes, because any time I've performed a shallow clone of a repository, the saving wasn't as much as one would intuitively imagine (in other words: history is stored very efficiently).
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"Will they remember to write the filter? Maybe, "
Nothing wrong with "forgetting" to write the filter, and then if it's taking more than 10 minutes, write the filter.
What? Why would you want to expose a beginner to waiting 10 minutes unnecessarily. How would they even know what they did wrong or what's a reasonable time to wait, ask chatgpt "why is my git clone taking 10 minutes"?!
Is this really the best we can do in terms of user experience? No. git need to step up.
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It is a solution. The fact beginners might not understand it doesn't really matter, solutions need not perish on that alone. Clone is a command people usually run once while setting up a repository. Maybe the case could be made that this behavior should be the default and that full clones should be opt-in but that's a separate issue.
We're working on `oxen` to solve a lot of the problems we ran into with git or git-lfs.
We have an open source CLI and server that mirrors git, but handles large files and mono repos with millions of files in a much more performant manner. Would love feedback if you want to check it out!
https://github.com/Oxen-AI/Oxen
How about git just fixes shallow clones and partial clones? Then we don't need convoluted work arounds to cheat in large content after we fully clone a history of pointers or promises or whatever. You should be able to set default clone depth by file type and size in the git attributes (or maybe a file that can also live above a repo like supporting attributes in .gitconfig locations?).
Then the usual settings would be to shallow clone the latest content as well as fetch the full history and maybe the text file historical content. Ideally you could prune to the clone depth settings as well.
Why are we still talking about large file pointers? If you fix shallow and partial clones, then any repo can be an efficient file mirror, right?
I've been using git + git-lfs to manage, sync and backup all my files (including media files and more) and it's quite convenient, but native support for large files would be great. I'd for example really like to be able to push large objects directly from one device to the next.
At the moment I'm using my own git server + git lfs deduplication using btrfs to efficiently handle the large files.
If large objects are just embedded in various packfiles this approach would no longer work, so I hope that such a behaviour can be controlled.
Nit:
> if I git clone a repo with many revisions of a noisome 25 MB PNG file
FYI ‘noisome’ is not a synonym for ‘noisy’ - it’s more of a synonym for ‘noxious’; it means something smells bad.
I believe that was the author's intent.
I guess maybe it’s the nonstandard sMEL chunk that bumps the size of the PNG file up so high. Seemed more to me that they were talking about an image of random noise though.
For what it's worth, I have a self hosted git forge where I upped the maximum filesize limit. I use git repositories for my science projects, they can each have hundreds of large files (> 25 Mb as described in the article). I don't use LFS, I don't encounter any issue.
Something they missed out with the GitLFS cons is authentication, if you don't use SSH-agent, pushing involves authenticating multiple times, sometimes more than 2-3 times in my experience.
git-annex is a good alternative to the solution of Githu, and it supports different storage backends. I'm actually surprised it's not more popular.
Was looking for a mention of git-annex and I completely agree. I’ve used it extensively and have found it works really well.
Any ideas why it isn’t more popular and more well known?
I use it, and love it.
But it's not intended for or good at (without forcing a square peg into a round hole) the sort of thing LFS and promisors are for, which is a public project with binary assets.
git-annex is really for (and shines at) a private backup solution where you'd like to have N copies of some data around on various storage devices, track the history of each copy, ensure that you have at least N copies etc.
Each repository gets a UUID, and each tracked file has a SHA-256 hash. There's a branch which has a timestamp and repo UUID to SHA-256 mapping, if you have 10 repos that file will have (at least) 10 entries.
You can "trust" different repositories to different degrees, e.g. if you're storing a file on both some RAID'd storage server, or an old portable HD you're keeping in a desk drawer.
This really doesn't scale for a public project. E.g. I have a repository that I back up my photos and videos in, that repository has ~700 commits, and ~6000 commits to the metadata "git-annex" branch, pretty close to a 1:10 ratio.
There's an exhaustive history of every file movement that's ever occurred on the 10 storage devices I've ever used for that repository. Now imagine doing all that on a project used by more than one person.
All other solutions to tracking large files along with a git repository forgo all this complexity in favor of basically saying "just get the rest where you cloned me from, they'll have it!".
> Any ideas why it isn’t more popular and more well known?
While git-annex works very well on Unix-style systems with Unix-style filesystems, it heavily depends on symbolic links, which do not exist on filesystems like exFAT, and are problematic on Windows (AFAIK, you have to be an administrator, or enable an obscure group policy). It has a degraded mode for these filesystems, but uses twice the disk space in that mode, and AFAIK loses some features.
The git storage model also needs an overhaul to be more like modern backup tools such as restic/borg; it needs content-defined chunking of files and directories.
I'm just dipping my toe into Data Version Control - DVC. It is aimed towards data science and large digital asset management using configurable storage sources under a git meta layer. The goal is separation of concerns: git is used for versioning and the storage layers are dumb storage.
Does anyone have feedback about personally using DVC vs LFS?
We built `oxen` to solve the issues we (and many others) had with DVC and LFS. The highlights: open source cli and server, mirrors git for easy learning, handles large files and millions of files, performant af. Would love feedback if you check it out.
https://github.com/Oxen-AI/Oxen
or check out the performance numbers https://docs.oxen.ai/features/performance
When I tried DVC ~5 years ago it was very slow as it constantly hashed files for some reason.
Switched to https://github.com/kevin-hanselman/dud and I have been happy since ..
I'm in the same boat - I decided this week for DVC over LFS.
For me, the deciding factor was that with LFS, if you want to delete objects from storage, you have to rewrite git history. At least, that's what both the Github and Gitlab docs specify.
DVC adds a layer of indirection, so that its structure is not directly tied to git. If I change my mind and delete the objects from S3, dvc might stop working, but git will be fine.
Some extra pluses about DVC: - It can point to versioned S3 objects that you might already have as part of existing data pipelines. - It integrates with the Python fsspec library to read the files on demand using paths like "dvc://path/to/file.parquet". This feels nicer than needing to download all the files up front.
I did a simple test tracking a few hundred gigs of random /dev/urandom data. LFS choked on upload speed while DVC worked fine. My team is using DVC now
It sounds like git-annex might be a good option for you. There is also https://www.datalad.org/ built on top of git-annex for large data management.
Writing type-free Python in 2025 is malpractice
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My main complaint about DVC is that it's hard to manage the files and if you keep modifying a big file you are going to end up with all the revisions stored in S3 (or whichever storage you choose). This is by design but I wish it was easier to set up like "store only the latest 3 revisions"
So this filter argument will reduce the repo size when cloning, but how will one reduce the repo size after a long stint of local commits of changing binary assets? Delete the repo and clone again?
It's really not clear which behaviour you want though. For example when you do lots of bisects you probably want to keep everything downloaded locally. If you're just working on new things, you may want to prune the old blobs. This information only exists in your head though.
The ideal behaviour is so have a filter on push too, meaning that files above a certain size should be deleted from non-latest history after push.
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Yes once it gets bad enough your only option is to abandon and move the source code only. Your old repo has the history pre abandon.
There is a trick for this, where you can setup a new repo to consider another as pre-initial-commit source of history.
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For lots of local edits you can squash commits using the rebase command with the interactive flag.
yeah, this isn't really solving the problem. It's just punting it. While I welcome a short-circuit filter, I see dragons ahead. Dependencies. Assets. Models... won't benefit at all as these repos need the large files - hence why there are large files.
There seems to be a misunderstanding. The --filter option simple doesn't populate content in the .git directory which is not required for the checkout. If there is a file that is large which is needed for the current checkout (ie the parts not in the .git folder), it will be fetched regardless of the filter option.
To put it another way, regardless of what max size you give to --filter, you will end up with a complete git checkout, no missing files.
It’s definitely not a full solution, but it seems like it would solve cases where having the full history of the large files available, just not on everyone’s machine, is the desired behavior.
10 years late is better than never.
Is the problem that we don't have good "diff" equivalents for binaries that git could use to only store those diffs like the old RCS/CVS for large files?
Not really. Git does use delta-based storage for binary files. It might not be as good as it could be for some files (e.g. compressed ones) but that's relatively easy to solve.
The real problem is that Git wants you to have a full copy of all files that have ever existed in the repo. As soon as you add a large file to a repo it's there forever and can basically never be removed. If you keep editing it you'll build up lots more permanent data in the repo.
Git is really missing:
1. A way to delete old data.
2. A way for the repo to indicate which data is probably not needed (old large binaries).
3. A way to serve large files efficiently (from a CDN).
Some of these can sort of be done, but it's super janky. You have to proactively add confusing flags etc.
subversion used to do that, actually probably still does... and also only checks out the latest revision. Svn is a bother in other ways of course, like being worse at regular version control, and only usable with access to the server etc.
There's a bunch of binary files that change a lot on small changes due to compression or how the data is serialised, so the problem doesn't go away completely. One could conceivably start handling that, but there are lots of file formats out there and the sum oc complexity tends to be bugs and security issues.
Potentially with a new blob type but maintaining a reverse diff would be difficult as it would change the hash of the previous version if you had to store the diff.
Another alternative would be storing the chunks as blobs so that you reconstruct the full binary and only have to store the changed chunks. However that doesn't work with compressed binaries.
I was just using git LFS and was very concerned with how bad the help message was compared to the rest of git. I know it seems small, but it just never felt like a team player, and now I'm very happy to hear this.
Is Git ever going to get proper support for binary files?
I’ve never used it for anything serious but my understanding is that Mercurial handles binary files better? Like it supports binary diffs if I understand correctly.
Any reason Git couldn’t get that?
I'm not sure binary diffs are the problem - e.g. for storing images or MP3s, binary diffs are usually worse than nothing.
I would think that git would need a parallel storage scheme for binaries. Something that does binary chunking and deduplication between revisions, but keeps the same merkle referencing scheme as everything else.
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> for storing images or MP3s, binary diffs are usually worse than nothing
Editing the ID3 tag of an MP3 file or changing the rating metadata of an image will give a big advantage to block level deduplication. Only a few such cases are needed to more than compensate for that worse than nothing inefficiencies of binary diffs when there's nothing to deduplicate.
A lot of people use Perforce Helix and others use Plastic SCM. That’s been my experience for like large binary assets with git-like functionality
I didn't enjoy using Plastic, but Perforce is ok (not to say that it's perfect - I miss a lot of git stuff). It does have no problems with lots of data though! This article moans about the overhead of a 25 MB png file... it's been a long time since i worked on a serious project where the head revision is less than 25 GB. Typical daily churn would be 2.5 GB+.
(It's been even longer since i used svn in anger, but maybe it could work too. It has file locking, and local storage cost is proportional to size of head revision. It was manageable enough with a 2 GB head revision. Metadata access speed was always terrible though, which was tedious.)
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My understanding is that git diff algorithms require a file to be segmentable (eg text files are split line-wise) and there is no general segmentation strategy for binary blobs.
But a good segmentation is only good for better compression and nicer diff, git could do byte wise diffs with no issues, so I wonder why doesn't git use customizable segmentation strategies where it calls external tools based on file type (eg a rust thingy for rust file etc, or a PNG thingy for PNG files).
At worst the tool would return either a single segment for the entire file or the byte wise split which would work anyway
A common misconception. git has always used binary deltas for pack files. Consider that git tree objects are themselves not text files, and git needs efficiently store slightly modified versions of the same tree.
All files in git are binary files.
All deltas between versions are binary diffs.
Git has always handled large (including large binary) files just fine.
What it doesn't like is files where a conceptually minor change changes the entire file, for example compressed or encrypted files.
The only somewhat valid complaint is that if someone once committed a large file and then it was later deleted (maybe minutes later, maybe years later) then it is in the repo and in everyone's checkouts forever. Which applies equally to small and to large files, but large ones have more impact.
That's the whole point of a version control system. To preserve the history, allowing earlier versions to be recreated.
The better solution would be to have better review of changes pushed to the master repo, including having unreviewed changes in separate, potentially sacrificial, repos until approved.
https://github.com/oneconcern/datamon Had written this git for data tool few years back (works with GCS but can be made to work with S3) 1. No server side 2. Immutable data (via GCS policies) 3. Ability to mount data sets as filesystems 4. Integrated with k8s. It was built to work for the needs of the startup funding it, but I would love it if it could be extended.
Have you tried Oxen.ai? they are doing more fine-tuning and inference now but they have an open-source data version control platform written in rust at the core of their product.
Partial clones are also dependent on the server side supporting this. GitHub is one of the very few that does. git.kernel.org for eg did not, last I checked.
the future of git is jj
Does it handle large files better? I thought it was just an improved interface over the git store.
The real GH LFS cost is not the storage but the bandwidth on pulling objects down for every fresh clone. $$$$$. See my other comment. :)
xet on hugging face does seem to not have such bandwidth issues imo. I wish that something like xet but open source could exist.
I could really use an alternative to Plastic SCM for 3D models. S3 is fine but lacks the nicities.
What I would love to see in an SCM that properly supports large binary blobs is storing the contents using Prolly trees instead of a simple SHA hash.
Prolly trees are very similar to Merkle trees or the rsync algorithm, but they support mutation and version history retention with some nice properties. For example: you always obtain exactly the same tree (with the same root hash) irrespective of the order of incremental edit operations used to get to the same state.
In other words, two users could edit a subset of a 1 TB file, both could merge their edits, and both will then agree on the root hash without having to re-hash or even download the entire file!
Another major advantage on modern many-core CPUs is that Prolly trees can be constructed in parallel instead of having to be streamed sequentially on one thread.
Then the really big brained move is to store the entire SCM repo as a single Prolly tree for efficient incremental downloads, merges, or whatever. I.e.: a repo fork could share storage with the original not just up to the point-in-time of the fork, but all future changes too.
Git has had a good run. Maybe it’s time for a new system built by someone who learned about DX early in their career, instead of via their own bug database.
If there’s a new algorithm out there that warrants a look…
Jujutsu unfortunately doesn't have any story for large files yet (as far as I can tell), but maybe soon ...
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Can you list some realistic workflows where people would be touching the same huge file but only changing much smaller parts of it?
And yes you can represent a whole repo as a giant tar file, but because the boundaries between hash segments won't line up with your file boundaries you get an efficiency hit with very little benefit. Unless you make it file-aware in which case it ends up even closer to what git already does.
Git knows how to store deltas between files. Making that mechanism more reliable is probably able to achieve more with less.
Most Microsoft office documents.
One of our projects has a UI editor with a 60MB file for nearly everything except images, and people work on different UI flows at the same time.
Binary database files containing “master data”.
Merging would require support from the DB engine, however.
What prevents Git from simply working better with large files?
git works just fine with large files. The problem is that when you clone a repo, or pull, by default it gets everything, including large files deep in the history that you probably don't care about anymore.
That was actually an initial selling point of git: you have the full history locally. You can work from the plane/train/deserted island just fine.
These large files will persist in the repo forever. So people look for options to segregate large files out so that they only get downloaded on demand (aka "lazily").
All the existing options (submodules, LFS, partial clones) are different answers to "how do we make certain files only download on demand"
No, git does not work 'just fine' with large files. It works like ass.
> All the existing options
Don't forget sparse checkouts!
IIRC, it take ages for it to index a large folder. I was trying to use it to store the diff of my backup folder that constantly get rclone'd and rsync'd over in case those fucked up catastrophically
Incredible.
Nice to see some Microsoft and Google emails contributing.
Microsoft uses git for office development https://danielsada.tech/blog/carreer-part-7-how-office-moved...
Google has android and chromium as well as Git+Gerrit-on-Borg https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/releasing/...
As it should be! If it's not native to git, it's not worth using. I'm glad these issues are finally being solved.
These new features are pretty awesome too. Especially separate large object remotes. They will probably enable git to be used for even more things than it's already being used for. They will enable new ways to work with git.
May I humbly suggest that those files probably belong in an LFS submodule called "assets" or "vendor"?
Then you can clone without checking out all the unnecessary large files to get a working build, This also helps on the legal side to correctly license your repos.
I'm struggling to see how this is a problem with git and not just antipatterns that arise from badly organized projects.
The problem I've run into with this is that those files stay in the history. Your git clones will get ridiculous, and you'll blast through any git repo size limits that you might have.
I just want my files to match what's expected when I pull a commit, that doesn't require some literal "commit build system" and "pull build system". Coming from perforce and SVN, I can't comprehend why git it so popular, beyond cargo cult. It's completely nonsensical to think that software is just source.
The user shouldn't have to think about such a thing. Version control should handle everything automatically and not force the user into doing extra work to workaround issues.
I always hated the “write your code like the next maintainer is a psychopath” mantra because it makes the goal unclear. I prefer the following:
Write your code/tools as if they will be used at 2:00 am while the server room is on fire. Because sooner or later they will be.
A lot of our processes are used like emergency procedures. Emergency procedures are meant to be brainless as much as possible. So you can reserve the rest of your capacity for the actual problem. My version essentially calls out Kernighan’s Law.
Organizing your files sensibly is not necessary to use LFS nor is it a "workaround". It's just a pattern I am suggesting to make life easier regardless of what tools you decide to use. I can't think of a case where organizing your project to fail gracefully is a bad idea.
Git does the responsible thing and lets the user determine how to proceed with the mess they've made.
I must say I'm increasingly suspicious of the hate that git receives these days.
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Git is fundamentally broken and bad. Almost all projects are defacto centralized. Your project is not Linux.
A good version control system would support petabyte scale history and terabyte scale clones via sparse virtual filesystem.
Git’s design is just bad for almost all projects that aren’t Linux.
(I know this will get downvoted. But most modern programmers have never used anything but Git and so they don’t realize their tool is actually quite bad! It’s a shame.)
> A good version control system would support petabyte scale history and terabyte scale clones via sparse virtual filesystem.
I like this idea in principle but I always wonder what that would look in practice, outside a FAANG company: How do you ensure the virtual file system works equally well on all platforms, without root access, possibly even inside containers? How do you ensure it's fast? What do you do in case of network errors?
NFS server not responding. Still trying...
Tom Lyon: NFS Must Die! From NLUUG 2024:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVF_djcccKc
>Why NFS must die, and how to get Beyond FIle Sharing in the cloud.
Slides:
https://nluug.nl/bestanden/presentaties/2024-05-21-tom-lyon-...
Eminent Sun alumnus says NFS must die:
https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/06/17/eminent-sun-alumnus-sa...
Someone just needs to do. Numerous companies have built their own cross-platform VFS layers. It’s hard but not intractable.
Re network errors. How many things break when GitHub is down? Quite a lot! This isn’t particularly special. Prefetch and clone are the same operation.
Yeah we're at the CVS stage where everyone uses it because everyone uses it.
But most people don't need most of its features and many people need features it doesn't have.
If you look up git worktrees, you'll find a lot of blog articles referring to worktrees as a "secret weapon" or similar. So git's secret weapon is a mode that lets you work around the ugliness of branches. This suggests that many people would be better suited by an SCM that isn't branch-based.
It's nice having the full history offline. But the scaling problems force people to adopt a workflow where they have a large number of small git repos instead of keeping the history of related things together. I think there are better designs out there for the typical open source project.
Git now has artificial feet to aim the foot guns at so they hit the right target.
I don't understand what you mean by "the ugliness of branches".
In my experience, branches are totally awesome. Worktrees make branches even more awesome because they let me check out multiple branches at once to separate directories.
The only way it could get better is if it somehow gains the ability to check out the same branch to multiple different directories at once.
Completely disagree. Git is fundamentally functional and good. All projects are local and decentralized, and any "centralization" is in fact just git hosting services, of which there are many options which are not even mutually exclusive.
Got works fine and is solid and well enough known to be a reasonable choice for most people.
But I encourage everyone to try out a few alternatives (and adopt their workflows at least for a while). I have no idea if you have or not.
But fine has never used the alternatives, one doesn’t really know just how nice things can be. Or, even if you still find fit to be your preferred can, having an alternative experience can open you to other possibilities and ways of working.
Just like everyone should try a couple of different programming languages or editors or anything else for size. You may not end up choosing it, but seeing the possibilities and different ways of thinking is a very good thing.
Yeah, the decentralized design is incredibly useful in the day-to-day, for ~any project size.
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Are you missing the central hosting services provide a good backup plan for your locally hosted git?
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Git lfs seems controversial in the comments here
Developers have their own drama
It is insane that almost after a century of running computations with data on computers we still don't have a good version control system that maps a code version to its relevant data version.
Still the approach is to put code and data in a folder and call it a day. Slap a "_FINAL" at the folder name and you are golden.
We had a repo that was at one point 25GB. It had Git LFS turned on but the files weren’t stored outside of BitBucket. Whenever a build was run in Bamboo, it would choke big time.
We found that we could move the large files to Artifactory as it has Git LFS support.
But the problem was the entire history that did not have Artifactory pointers. Every clone included the large files (for some reason the filter functionality wouldn’t work for us - it was a large repo and it it had hundreds of users amongst other problems)
Anyways what we ended up doing was closing that repo and opening a new one with the large files stripped.
Nitpick in the authors page:
“ Nowadays, there’s a free tier, but you’re dependent on the whims of GitHub to set pricing. Today, a 50GB repo on GitHub will cost $40/year for storage”
This is not true as you don’t need GitHub to get LFS support