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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T09:51:14+00:00

I tried to remove a file from my remote repo by running: git filter-branch

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I tried to remove a file from my remote repo by running:

git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch Rakefile' HEAD

But Git complains that

Cannot create new backup. A previous backup already exists in refs/original/
Force overwriting the backup with -f
rm: cannot remove /.git-rewrite/backup-refs : Permission denied
rm: cannot remove directory /.git-rewrite : Directory not empty

This was after I already deleted the .git-rewrite directory on Windows.

How can I remove that file? It’s a 29Mb file sitting on my repo, so I quite need to remove the file.

I tried to delete the commit in git rebase -i, but apparently because the commit touched a lot of different files, Git complains of conflicts and I aborted to be safe.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You have already performed a filter-branch operation. After filter-branch, Git keeps refs to the old commits around, in case something goes wrong.

    You can find those in .git/refs/original/…. Either delete that directory and all files within, or use the -f flag to force Git to delete the old references.

    git filter-branch -f \
--index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch Rakefile' HEAD
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