Git LFS (Large File Storage) is an extension for git to deal with large files. Git is a distributed version control system where users typically have a complete copy of the version control history. This means that tracking large binary files quickly becomes untenable.

LFS solves this by making git replace large files with references to a file server where the large files are stored. The files are then retrieved as needed from the LFS server. For end-users git appears to work as usual to a large degree.

Adding Files as LFS Tracked

Assume that you want LFS to store any exe-files you may commit. Then you can run the command:

git lfs track "*.exe"

This will add a line to the .gitattributes

*.exe filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text~

The file must be committed to git itself so that the behavior gets replicated to other users of the repository.

git add .gitattributes

CET Operator Speedup

Initial checkout of the CET base repository can be a bit slow on some connections due to the large amount of files needed to be retrieved. If initial checkout is performed with CET Operator an archive file be retrieved with the appropriate data, this will speed things up as some overhead is eliminated by transferring a single large file instead of multiple small ones.