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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T12:03:52+00:00

I’m already familiar with answers to the general question, how to manage large binary

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I’m already familiar with answers to the general question, how to manage large binary files in git (or a large number of files). And I’ve looked at git-annex, bup, and git-media. None claim very good access for the Windows user.

Are there any such programs that run well on Windows?

To add context, I’m trying to version control my system deployment bits: OS images, drivers, 3rd party installers, 1st party installers (our applications). I need to have everything in a coherent bundle (tags). And be able to get the entire bundle for any of our active releases.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Not that I know of, and as you know, large binary files aren’t compatible with:

    • VCS (since there is no sense in diff’ing them or merging them)
    • DVCS (where a distributed repo is meant to be cloned, which is quickly cumbersome with an obese repo)

    The only remaining solution (OS agnostic actually) remains an external artifact repository (like a Nexus one for instance) to store those binaries.

    The OP Anthony Mastrean adds that he needs to:

    version control my system deployment bits: OS images, drivers, 3rd party installers, 1st party installers (our applications).
    I need to have everything in a coherent bundle (tags). And be able to get the entire bundle for any of our active releases

    That would be mixing:

    • development requirements (versioning, meaning branching and comparing versions)
    • with deployment requirements (getting all the right labels in order to deploy and run)

    Anything which isn’t developed (i.e anything built or already existing) should be out of a VCS (except for very small resources, like icons for instance, which don’t change much).

    What you usually version is a “release file” which contains all the extra information (checksums, path to other referentials, …) for the deployment script to operate, fetching the right artifacts.

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