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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

Honestly? Be a good customer. Help them help you and help yourself in the meanwhile

Having a 1TB file sucks in way more ways than just "your backup provider doesn't support it". Believe me.

The problem is that it is often possible to solve the problem for (your) future, but you cannot get rid of the existing large files (if only for legacy reasons).

One example: A Git repository that I created contained files that are above GitHub's file size limits. The reason was a bad design in my program. I could fix this design mistake, so that all files in the current revision of my Git repository are now "small". But I still cannot use GitHub because some old commit still contains these large files. So, I use(d) BitBucket instead of GitHub.

You can rewrite the history of the repository to remove the huge files, if you wish.

Of course, all the commit identifiers change.

> You can rewrite the history of the repository to remove the huge files, if you wish.

These old files nevertheless contain valuable data that I want to keep. Converting them to the new, much improved format would take serious efforts.

On the other hand this means shifting responsibility to deal with past mistakes onto somebody else.

Are you really sure you cannot rebase/edit/squash the commits in that git repositories?

Yes, commit hashes will change, but will it actually be a problem?

> On the other hand this means shifting responsibility to deal with past mistakes onto somebody else.

This was just one example. Let me give another one:

In some industries for audit reasons you have to keep lots of old data in case some auditor or regulator asks questions. In such a situation, the company cannot say "hey sorry, we changed our data format, so we cannot provide you the data that you asked for." - this will immediately get the company into legal trouble. Instead, while one is allowed to improve things, perfect capability to handle the old data has to be ensured.

If the repository is personal one managed only by you, you can squash the commits so the large files disappear from the history.

You can do that on shared repos too but that would cause a bad headache to other maintainers.

Perhaps you could say something concrete, rather than vague waffle and assertions?

Perhaps you could say something concrete, rather than vague criticism?

What am I supposed to say in response to a comment conveying the message "be a good customer" with no further elaboration and the source "believe me"?

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