Handling repositories with large binary files

In some specific circumstances, you might need to track huge binary assets in the code base. For example, gaming teams have to handle huge 3D models, and web development teams might need to track raw image assets or Photoshop documents. Both gaming development and web development might require video files to be under version control. Additionally, sometimes, you might want the convenience of including large binary deliverables that are difficult or expensive to generate – for example, storing a snapshot of a virtual machine image.

There are some tweaks you can make to improve how binary assets are handled by Git. For binary files that change significantly from version to version (and not just change some metadata headers), you might want to turn off the delta compression by adding -delta explicitly for specific types of files in a .gitattributes file (see Chapter 3, Managing Your Worktrees, and Chapter 13, Customizing and Extending...