How to shrink the .git folder

Question

My current base has a total size of approx. 200MB.

But my .git folder has an amazing size of 5GB (!). Since I push my work to an external server, i don\'t need any b

Answer 1

I'm using git more as synchronization mechanism than for version history. So my solution to this problem has been to make sure I have all my current sources in a satisfactory state, and then just delete .git and re-initialize the repos. Disk space problem solved. :-) History gone :-( I do this because my repo is on a small USB key. I don't want or need my entire history. If I had a method for just truncating the history, I would use that.

If I were interested in keeping my history I would archive the current repository. At some point later I could clone the original repository, copy over all the changes from the new repo (let's assume I haven't done much (any) renaming or deleteing). And then make one big commit that would represent all the changes made in the new repo as a single commit in the old repo. Is it possible to merge the histories? Maybe if I used a branch and then deleted the objects I didn't need. (I dont' know enough about git internals to start fooling around like that).