Repository Migration

Migrating from other version control systems to MediaGit.

From Git-LFS

If you currently use Git-LFS to store large media files, you can migrate your assets to MediaGit while keeping source code in Git.

Step 1: Pull all LFS content locally

git lfs pull

This downloads all LFS-tracked files to your working tree.

Step 2: Initialize a MediaGit repository

mediagit init

Step 3: Add all media files

# For parallel ingestion (recommended)
mediagit add --jobs $(nproc) --all

This processes all files in the current directory. For large collections (hundreds of GB), expect several minutes to several hours depending on file count, file types, and hardware.

Step 4: Commit

mediagit commit -m "Initial import from Git-LFS"

Step 5: Configure a remote and push

# In .mediagit/config.toml
[remotes.origin]
url = "http://media-server.example.com/my-project"

mediagit push origin main

Ongoing workflow

After migration, continue tracking code with Git and assets with MediaGit:

project/
├── .git/       ← Git repository for code
├── .mediagit/  ← MediaGit repository for assets
├── src/        ← tracked by Git
└── assets/     ← tracked by MediaGit

Remove large files from Git-LFS tracking in .gitattributes and stop using git lfs track.

From Plain Git (Large Files in History)

If your Git repository has large binary files committed directly:

Step 1: Export the current state of large files

# Identify large files in Git history
git rev-list --objects --all | \
  git cat-file --batch-check='%(objecttype) %(objectname) %(objectsize) %(rest)' | \
  awk '/^blob/ && $3 > 10485760 {print $4, $3}' | sort -k2 -rn

Step 2: Copy large files to a separate directory

mkdir ../media-export
# Copy each identified large file:
cp assets/video.mp4 ../media-export/
cp assets/textures/ ../media-export/ -r

Step 3: Import into MediaGit

mkdir ../my-media-repo
cd ../my-media-repo
mediagit init
mediagit add --jobs $(nproc) ../media-export/
mediagit commit -m "Initial import from Git"

Step 4: Remove large files from Git history (optional)

Use git filter-repo to remove large files from Git history and reduce repository size:

pip install git-filter-repo
git filter-repo --strip-blobs-bigger-than 10M

From File System (No VCS)

If your media assets are on a file system with no version control:

mediagit init
mediagit add --jobs $(nproc) /path/to/media/
mediagit commit -m "Initial import"

For very large collections (TB-scale), run add in batches by directory:

for dir in /media/project/*/; do
  mediagit add --jobs 16 "$dir"
  mediagit commit -m "Import $(basename "$dir")"
done

Verifying the Migration

After migration, verify all files were ingested correctly:

# Check object integrity
mediagit fsck

# Review statistics
mediagit stats

# Spot-check specific files
mediagit verify --path assets/hero-video.mp4

Storage Efficiency After Migration

MediaGit’s deduplication and delta encoding provide significant storage savings for versioned media collections:

Run mediagit stats after committing multiple versions to see actual compression and deduplication ratios.

See Also

• MediaGit vs Git-LFS
• Performance Optimization
• Large File Optimization
• Storage Backend Configuration