Documentation on moving content into LFS
Problem to solve
When a project is getting started with LFS, to help reduce the size of their git repo and improve performance, they will need to move some of the existing large files out of the repo in order to actuall reduce the size.
Simply deleting the file in a commit will not save space, since the last copy and all previous versions and still within the git history.
We should provide instructions for how to safely move content to LFS, especially now that we are thinking of enforcing more of the git repo size limits.
Intended users
Further details
Proposal
We need to provide documentation and instructions for how to move existing content within a git repo to LFS. This should be something like what Bitbucket has done here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/use-bfg-to-migrate-a-repo-to-git-lfs-834233484.html
Once we have this documentation, we should link to it from within the product:
- Display if a project has hit its size limit, so users understand a path towards reducing its size
- Potentially once we start surfacing tags for LFS, so users can understand how to move additional content there
- Perhaps we should also start to suggest certain large binary files to be moved into LFS? https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/58912