Throwing away old history on git repo full of binaries

Question

I've got a git repo with three years worth of PowerBuilder binary files. The repo is pretty huge (just under 10GB), I assume due to the fact that git can only do so much for binary deltas.

I'd like to get this repo to a manageable size, and I'm willing to throw away a bunch of early history to do it. I just can't figure out how to get git to do it. I tried squashing commits with interactive rebase, but it comes up with a bunch of conflicts I don't want to deal with.

Is there a way to pick a commit, and just throw away everything before that? I realize it will rewrite the SHA-1 for subsequent commits, which is no problem.

Answer 1

This is one (other) way:

git fast-export master~5..master | (cd ../newrepo.git && git init . && git fast-import && git checkout)

The above example will take commits in range master~5..master and create new repo out of that. You can use the same repo too, but the above will be safer.