git

Git stores everything. It is a version control tool after all. What is once committed will always be available for anyone to checkout. But how does git stores all versions of your files? Does it copy every version? No. It just detects changes and takes note of them. After all, adding a new function to your class is just inserting some lines into a text file. But this doesn’t always help you to save repository space.

If you’ve added a file then deleted it in the next commit, it doesn’t go away. It has to be stored somewhere to allow you to access it in the future if you wish. These kinds of commits might cause your repository to grow and make it uncomfortably large for cloning. “There must be a way to clean this mess!” I hear you say and there is! But first, we have to figure out why your git repository is unnecessarily large.