BFG repo cleaner is not shrinking a specific repo

Question

Is there a scenario where BFG doe not shrink a repo ?

I have used BFG repo multiple times over several repos with success. Great tool !

However, for one specific repo, I am not getting any reduction at all. The strange this is that I used BFG repo on this a few days ago and saw a 500 MB reduction but now after downloading a fresh repo and following the steps, I see an increase in the size (see pics below). To make sure my eyes weren't deceiving me, I re-ran BFG for another large repo and it was redcued by a third as expected. Only this repo is an issue.

So, before running BFG Repo Cleaner for this repo (ie running the git mirror command), this is the size of the my-big-repo.git folder

After running

java -jar bfg-1.13.0.jar --strip-blobs-bigger-than 20M some-big-repo.git

this is the size. Which is okay, because the repo hasn't been culled yet

Plenty of files have been deleted, as I see in the output

Deleted files

    Filename                       Git id
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    binhss.fru                   | 6ef438da (22.1 MB)
    158253.mp4                   | ca14075d (21.0 MB)
    24605.zip                    | 5b6c4eab (23.5 MB)
    24615.zip                    | 5423c47d (25.1 MB)
    40786.zip                    | 1e625ec7 (25.8 MB)
    40792.zip                    | af634c8e (25.2 MB)
    littleBit.zip                | 3a6a2563 (51.9 MB)
    XOOMOT.zip                   | 29f8097e (21.7 MB)
    Rapis.mp4                    | 9b83c06c (24.0 MB)
    Database_Backup.zip          | fc2657d9 (76.4 MB), e9033a52 (152.9 MB), ...
    Erskinine.dll                | 671d580e (24.7 MB)

However, after running the last commands

$ cd some-big-repo.git
$ git reflog expire --expire=now --all && git gc --prune=now --aggressive

this is the size

How is this possible ?

Answer 1

Are all those files deleted in the latest commit?

The BFG treats your current commits as sacred, by default:

http://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/#protected-commits

By default, the BFG will clean out old versions of your files, but will carefully preserve the contents of your latest files.

See also https://github.com/rtyley/bfg-repo-cleaner/issues/182

https://github.com/rtyley/bfg-repo-cleaner/issues/178