TLDR
Git garbage collect: git gc
Gitting Too Big
Some time ago, I switched to using git to backup my Zotero folder. This means that I have a versioned backup of my Zotero content that auto updates every day. I noticed, however, that git is taking up kind of a lot of space:
$ cd ~/Zotero
$ du -h | grep git
...
13G ./.git
Everything that’s not hidden in my Zotero folder was taking up about 4GB. In other words, my git folder now exceeds the size of my Zotero folder by over 200%…
Gitting a bit Smaller
Git comes to the rescue with “garbage collection”. I don’t know what it does but it makes things smaller:
$ git gc
$ du -h | grep git
...
3.4G ./.git
It seems to do some compression and, I would think, deduplication.