使用 git 合并手动复制目录中的更改

Question

At work I keep a backup of a large directory on our remote VPS using git. Because I live in a very remote town with poor, expensive internet, I cannot copy this repo over the internet. Instead, when I started working from home, I brought a copy of the directory on an external drive (unfortunately without the ".git" subdirectory).

I have made about 10kb worth of changes to files in my home copy of the directory. I would like to merge these in to the git repo on the remote server without transferring the whole directory over the internet.

Steps so far:

git init
git add .
git commit -m "initial"
git remote add VPS [SSH_ADDRESS]
git remote show VPS   # successfully connects to remote

Now I'd like to merge the 10kb of changes I've made locally without transferring the GB of data that are unchanged.

Steps I've tried but failed:

git push VPS   # can't because there are non-integrated remote changes
git fetch VPS  # starts downloading GBs of data

Not sure where to go next.

Answer 1

A hacky approach that tries to transfer as little data as possible, not using git's transport methods, that may or may not work:

• generate patches of your local work ( git format-patch )
• compress those patches ( tar or zip )
• send them to to the remote server ( scp or rsync )
• login to the remote server ( ssh )
• apply the patches ( unzip / tar followed by git apply ), fix conflicts and edit the history to your liking

This will leave your local copy out of sync, as before.

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Assuming that the "GBs of data" are large files and not many small changes/files, you can circumvent having to store them in the actual git repo.

There are multiple approaches to this problem, of which I have tried neither, but here are some pretty well known:

• Git lfs (large file storage): https://git-lfs.github.com/
• Git annex: https://git-annex.branchable.com/