I was just working with an old repository where I had inadvertently committed a large file ~300MB. I subsequently removed it, but not in a way that took it out of history. I discovered it when I went to push to GitHub and it complained. These are the steps I used to get rid of the file:
- git filter-branch --prune-empty -f --index-filter 'git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch source/spikes/mo_offender_fak930.txt'
-tag-name-filter cat -- --all - git update-ref -d refs/original/refs/heads/master
- git reflog expire --expire=now –all
- git gc --prune=now
Here are some pages I found useful to figure this all out:
http://naleid.com/blog/2012/01/17/finding-and-purging-big-files-from-git-history
