Question on work-flow for big binary files

[Marcus Lindblom]

Andrei Vermel wrote:
>> It boils down to this: is it feasible with a distributed versioning 
>> system of really large files? Perhaps I should run some 
>> tests, but it's 
>> hard to predict performance a few years down the line.
>>
>> Anyone with experience in that field? How much data can one feasibly 
>> work with in a DVCS? Am I trying to use the wrong tool for the job?
>>
> At some point I got a file of about 170Mb checked in, but then it would not
> check out.
> Now we are using an extension 'bigfiles'. See
> http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2008-November/022175.html
> In our experience the current 10Mb warning limit is a safe one, but we are
> thinking about lowering it further down to 2Mb on our site so that the repo
> won't grow too much due to the binaries.

Good to know.

Using this together with a prune-pass on the server repo could be a way 
forward. Still, I'm reluctant to clone a big repo, unless it would fetch 
bigfiles from the master on demand.

Cheers
/Marcus