you can copy/move/clone the local repo you already have. no need to clone from remote just to switch to a different machine.
The question was more intended to probe remote UX resilience near the limits of pain when faced with massive git repos which primarily capture binary assets/artifacts.
i have been discussing this on HN before in the context of a multi TB archive of photos and videos (part of which happened to be for a film project, so similar considerations apply). raid, external disk, and remote copy. for the film footage, everyone working with it has a full copy too, even if they don't need all of it. just in case. if you need to work with the data there is pretty much no other option.