Purging file from Git repo failed, unable to create new backup
git, git-commit, git-filter-branch, git-rewrite-history
Solution
You have already performed a filter-branch operation. After filter-branch, Git keeps refs to the old commits around, in case something goes wrong.
You can find those in `.git/refs/original/…`. Either delete that directory and all files within, or use the `-f` flag to force Git to delete the old references.
git filter-branch -f \
--index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch Rakefile' HEAD
Problem
I tried to remove a file from my remote repo by running: ``` git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch Rakefile' HEAD ``` But Git complains that Cannot create new backup. A previous backup already exists in refs/original/ Force overwriting the backup with -f rm: cannot remove /.git-rewrite/backup-refs : Permission denied rm: cannot remove directory /.git-rewrite : Directory not empty This was after I already deleted the .git-rewrite directory on Windows. How can I remove that file? It's a 29Mb file sitting on my repo, so I quite need to remove the file. I tried to delete the commit in `git rebase -i`, but apparently because the commit touched a lot of different files, Git complains of conflicts and I aborted to be safe.