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Asked: 2026-05-19T23:17:21+00:00

I’m afraid I couldn’t find anything quite like this particular scenario. I have a

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I’m afraid I couldn’t find anything quite like this particular scenario.

I have a git repository with a lot of history: 500+ branches, 500+ tags, going back to mid-2007. It contains ~19,500 commits. We’d like to remove all of the history before Jan 1, 2010, to make it smaller and easier to deal with (we would keep a complete copy of the history in an archive repository).

I know the commit that I want to have become the root of the new repository. I can’t, however, figure out the correct git mojo to truncate the repo to start with that commit. I’m guessing some variant of 

git filter-branch

involving grafts would be necessary; it might also be necessary to treat each of the 200+ branches we want to keep separately and then patch the repo back together (something I do know how to do).

Has anyone ever done something like this? I’ve got git 1.7.2.3 if that matters.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Note: this has been deprecated in favor of git replace.

    You can create a graft of the parent of your new root commit to no parent (or to an empty commit, e.g. the real root commit of your repository). E.g. echo "<NEW-ROOT-SHA1>" > .git/info/grafts

    After creating the graft, it takes effect right away; you should be able to look at git log and see that the unwanted old commits have gone away:

    $ echo 4a46bc886318679d8b15e05aea40b83ff6c3bd47 > .git/info/grafts
$ git log --decorate | tail --lines=11
commit cb3da2d4d8c3378919844b29e815bfd5fdc0210c
Author: Your Name <your.email@example.com>
Date:   Fri May 24 14:04:10 2013 +0200

    Another message
 
commit 4a46bc886318679d8b15e05aea40b83ff6c3bd47 (grafted)
Author: Your Name <your.email@example.com>
Date:   Thu May 23 22:27:48 2013 +0200

    Some message

    If all looks as intended, you can utilize git filter-branch -- --all to make it permanent.

    BEWARE: after doing the filter-branch step, all commit ids will have changed, so anybody using the old repo must never merge with anyone using the new repo.

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