what are limitations of shallow clone
git
Solution
I would urge you to store binary files in a dedicated repository, easy to scale and easy to clean up: an artifact repo like Nexus. You have other alternatives in "How to handle a large git repository?".
Trying to keep everything in Git, using it in some unnatural way, will always result in more trouble that is is worth: it is a source control tool. You might as well use it for what it is good for.
That being said, a shallow clone doesn't support push (or, at least, it is dangerous: see "Why can't I push from a shallow clone?"). For read-only purpose, a simple `git archive` would be enough, as mentioned in "not understanding git shallow clone".
Updates 2015:
- actually, you now can use a shallow clone for push/pull, see "Is `git clone --depth 1` (shallow clone) more useful than it makes out?"
- you can (with Git 2.5+) even fetch a single commit. See "Pull a specific commit from a remote git repository".
Problem
In our organization where we are trying to introduce Git, we have now a problem related to Git behavior with respect to binary files. Our projects will have a good mix of binary and text type files and a typical size could be 1 GB. Our fear is that after few years a full clone would become too big and cause performance and disk space issues. One of the environment that would migrate to Git have their SW currently on a system called TCM. The total size of repositories with versions of 7-10 years is 2 TB. Another environment on ClearCase has around 7-8 years data of around 1 TB. With Git not storing in deltas which will particularly affect binary files, a situation post 5+ years is causing concern to our users. Shallow clone feature would have been ideal. But the docu says this "A shallow repository has a number of limitations (you cannot clone or fetch from it, nor push from nor into it), but is adequate if you are only interested in the recent history of a large project with a long history, and would want to send in fixes as patches.". A cursory check on shallow clones would show that it works fine, but definitely there are known use-cases where it wont work, hence document Is there a known list of use-cases where this wont work?