Git lfs - “this exceeds GitHub's file size lim

Question

I have some csv files that are larger than github's file size limit of 100.00 MB. I have been trying to use the Git Large File Storage extension.

https://git-lfs.github.com/

From LFS - "Large file versioning- Version large files—even those as large as a couple GB in size—with Git."

I have applied the following on the folders of concern:

git lfs track "*.csv"

However, when I push:

remote: error: File Time-Delay-ftn/Raw-count-data-minor-roads1.csv is 445.93 MB; this exceeds GitHub's file size limit of 100.00 MB
remote: error: File Time-Delay-ftn/Raw-count-data-major-roads.csv is 295.42 MB; this exceeds GitHub's file size limit of 100.00 MB

When I look at the folder in question:

-rw-r-----   1 user  staff    42B 23 Oct 12:34 .gitattributes
-rw-r--r--   1 user  staff   1.3K 19 Oct 14:32 DfT_raw_major_manipulation.py
-rw-r--r--   1 user  staff   1.2K 16 Oct 15:08 DfT_raw_minor_manipulation.py
drwxr-xr-x  21 user  staff   714B 22 Oct 11:35 Driving/
-rwxr-xr-x@  1 user  staff   295M 19 Oct 14:47 Raw-count-data-major-roads1.csv*
-rwxr-xr-x@  1 user  staff   446M 16 Oct 14:52 Raw-count-data-minor-roads1.csv*

when I vim the .gitattributes file you can see the lfs setup:

*.csv filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text

What am I doing wrong?

UPDATE

When I query

git lfs ls-files

I get nothing returned. This indicates that despite the .csv filter being successfully applied to the .gitattributes file the csv files are not being picked up by lfs

Answer 1

It looks like you haven't initialised git-lfs. Try to type

git lfs init

Source: Installing Git LFS

Answer 2

I hit the same problem yesterday and cracked it. I was unable to push, and it appeared that none of my big files were in lfs.

There is probably a better way, but this worked for me. I have a large repo with 2.5 gigs of data.

I setup a new repo then setup lfs in it. git lfs init

I then configured my various file types git lfs track "*.pdb" git lfs track "*.dll" I then commmited my changes and pushed.

I then added my big files. I used sourcetree, and in the output notes it would state for the big files matching my wildcards that it was committing tiny txt file instead. (sorry, I didn't record these, but it should be obvious).

Then I pushed, and I saw 'skipping files', and the push succeeded quickly.

so the problem is probably trying to add files to lfs that are already in your history. You can only add new files. You can probably clean your repo of these files.

Note: I did find that quite a few files that matched my wildcards were not picked up by lfs. Similar files in different folders were picked up, but not all. I tried explicitly adding these files using the full path. git lfs track "Windows/bin/myBigFile.dll" but that didn't help either. In the end I gave up due to time constraints.

You should also check your storage limit with gitHub. I purchased the extra 50gig to cover my requirements.

Cloning the repo now downloads the files separately and everything is finally working well.

Answer 3

Simply adding git-lfs configuration to an existing repository will not retroactively convert your large files to LFS support. Those large files will remain in your history and GitHub will refuse your pushes.

You need to rewrite your history to introduce git-lfs to your existing commits. I recommend the BFG repo cleaner tool, which added LFS support recently.

You should be able to convert historical usage of your CSV files by:

$ java -jar ~/bfg-1.12.5.jar --convert-to-git-lfs '*.csv' --no-blob-protection

Answer 4

I had this error:

remote: error: File client/static/static-version/20171221_221446.psd is 223.61 MB; this exceeds GitHub's file size limit of 100.00 MB

And because I already removed this file from this folder, created .gitignore file and tried to commit couple times, I didn't know that it was cached, I could not push to github. In my case helped:

git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch client/static/static-version/20171221_221446.psd'

Where I placed full file path(from error above) to remove it from cache. After that, push was made successfully