Why cannot add a large file to a Git repository

Question

Why Git does not support committing very big files? I'm trying to add a 4Gb file and I get the following error:

C:\Users\danipen\gitrepos\vmstore>git add mybigfile.rar
fatal: Out of memory? mmap failed: No such file or directory

UPDATE: Seems that git has a problem handling big files.

Have you tried this http://stackoverflow.com/a/6812201/220710 — Emil Davtyan, Sep 15 '14 at 08:36
@EmilDavtyan: Thanks for the answer, I'll try. Seems that git has a problem handling big files. I'll update my question. — Daniel Peñalba, Sep 15 '14 at 08:38

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited May 07 '15 at 18:10

4

Should large binary files be in the repository, my opinion is no.

But if you really need version control on binaries or assets consider something like git-fat, or git-lfs

edited May 07 '15 at 18:10

Community

answered Sep 15 '14 at 08:44

Leon

Even git-lfs can't save you. https://github.com/git-lfs/git-lfs/issues/2434 – cowlinator Jul 16 '20 at 20:29

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 15 '14 at 08:44

3

The idea of Git is to track small files with code. So the suggestion is to include your source files and ignore very big files like static files.

if you include a 4GB file every people who clone the repo have to clone the whole 4GB. Thats not the right way.

answered Sep 15 '14 at 08:44

René Höhle

But then there's an unsolved problem here: how to version control a large (4GB) file. Back to square one. – cowlinator Jul 16 '20 at 20:30

2 Answers2