Re: Removing data from repository

[Paul Smith <paul@mad-scientist.net>]

On Thu, 2019-01-24 at 14:51 +0000, Naum Derzhi wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I have this problem: years ago one of our developers committed a
> large (Gigabytes) piece of binary data into our project repository.
> This should not have been done, but it happened. (Honest, it was not
> me). We never needed this data in the repository.
> 
> Using git rm removes these files from the working tree, but they are
> still somewhere in the repository, so when we clone, we transfer
> gigabytes of unneeded data. 
> 
> Is it possible to fix this problem?

It is possible, but it isn't pretty.  By waiting so long to try to fix
it you've compounded the impacts dramatically unfortunately.  By
removing that file you will in effect be rewriting the history of your
repository starting with the commit that introduced the problematic
file, that will be removed, all the way forward.

That means that every clone of the repository will have to be, at the
very least, "hard-reset" and preferably (to avoid accidentally re-
introducing the bad file) re-cloned from scratch.

As for actually removing the file, you can find information on how to
do this all over the Google.  Here's some reasonable advice from
StackOverflow:


https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2100907/how-to-remove-delete-a-large-file-from-commit-history-in-git-repository