I know Git has their LFS service but I'm trying to find options that are lower cost (very low budget lol). So far my dev buddy and I have been sharing large files (high res textures mostly) over Dropbox/Google Drive, but the syncing doesn't always work correctly on my machine and it's a bit of a pain point in our workflow. We use Unity, fwiw.

Would love any advice on this from anyone who has encountered this issue! If the only option is paid, then it's paid. But if there's a free option out there, I'd love to hear about it! Thanks the any advice!

"Git LFS is a new, open source extension that replaces large files with text pointers inside Git, while storing the file contents on a remote server like GitHub.com or GitHub Enterprise. "

Does this look like and alternative to Perforce for gamedevs?

Pricing seems expensive.

"Every user and organization on GitHub.com with Git LFS enabled will begin with 1 GB of free file storage and a monthly bandwidth quota of 1 GB. If your workflow requires higher quotas, you can easily purchase more storage and bandwidth for your account."

Hello, I am working on my game, and I'd like to have my git repo have an external upload download. Ok, so I go to github. I turn on git LFS so git doesn't try to do funny things with my files, and then I git push. 1 minute later I recieve an email saying my 1GB limit has been reached. Does it make sense to pay them, or is there a good, free alternative with a higher total storage limit that would have clean integration with git?
Basically all I want is a good version control solution that can handle binary files and can also remotely host my repo for free preferably, and also preferably have a clean CLI/GUI interface that lets me perform advanced repository management functions. I am using Unity btw, if Unity's Version Control checks all those boxes, but it didn't seem like it from looking at the page.

We're a newbie team of two building our own game. We're thinking of availing their LFS data pack plan. GitHub says that they can give $5 per 50GB a month. We're willing to shell out but figured to ask the experts(looking at you) first. Thanks!

I'm working with a university student team that needs to store a 70GB project in Git. There are many files that change often, so we want at least minimal source control (i.e. "this file changed") for the large binary files. University student project so we have no budget, or would have to go through tons of hoops, to pay the high costs of Github LFS (they're moving to a model where they charge $0.0875 per gigabyte for egress, meaning simply onboarding a new student = $6.125 immediate cost! 10GB worth of LFS files changed * say 7 students = another $6.125 for students to pull the changes..., and this isn't even counting the storage costs themselves - about $4.90/month for 70GB.)

I've been considering how we could use LFS on another service hosted within the university while keeping the main project on Github. We have servers in-house with plenty of storage and resources to hold the data. I've found projects like Giftless that seem to do what I want, but I haven't been able to find any documentation on exactly how to set this up. I know that you can simply set an alternative URL for Git LFS, but there's gotta be more to the story - how can I do SSH key authentication for the LFS objects for example? Each student has a public SSH key enrolled in their Github accounts - how could I also say "you need possession of one of these keys to access the LFS objects?"

I'm sure someone will say "just use Gitea/Gitlab and move the project there". The main reason I don't just have students move over to a fully self-hosted solution like Gitlab or Gitea is that we're also working with an external code reviewer who doesn't need access to the blobs but does need to be able to view the code changes in real time. Our university requires any internally hosted service to be accessed via a VPN that requires university credentials, so I can't give the external reviewer access to a self-hosted Gitea. But since that reviewer only needs the files that will actually be in Github and not the LFS blobs, the solution for me would be to have the LFS objects hosted on an internal VPN service but then have the main project on Github so that external reviewers can access just the source code. Outside reviewers would not ever make changes to the code directly, so no issues with messing with the LFS pointers.

We could maybe arrange for the reviewers to have access to the in-house service, but that would require, again, tons of hoops and thus time - security audits, setting up external credentials, yada yada. IT policies are fun, no? And yes I've already checked - my setup would be allowed by IT since the external reviewer does not need to access the internal network - their concern is the network, not the content, in this case.

Any advice on how I can do this?

It looks like GitHub changed their website and I can no longer find where to view the Git LFS Data page and add another data pack of 50GB of storage in my organization.

For some context the project is on an organization under another account. In the organization I use to go into the settings and add more Git LFS storage under "Billing and plan". It looks like the option has been removed and replaced with "Billing and licensing". I am getting error messages that I can't push to GitHub. Does anyone know where I can go to add another 50GB of storage to the organization account so I can start pushing to LFS again. Thank you.

I started using Git LFS for a big existing project and after a few pushes I got an email telling me I exceeded my storage limit. The email pointed me to a link where I supposedly could purchase a bigger data pack, but it actually just links to a page that shows me my usage and doesn't offer me any subscrition plans or anything. Even the page where you can compare Github Free vs Pro doesn't really mention LFS at all.

Does anyone know how I can solve this issue?

I'm using this for the first time. I want to know, can I work on a private repository for my game on GitHub with Git LFS with no storage restrictions?

Just a little noob question here. I’ve been using Git LFS to push my Unity project to GitHub but I’ve been having to pay a monthly subscription for it now. I feel like it’s a bit unnecessary. Is there an alternative to LFS I could use that is completely free? Thanks guys!

https://github.com/blog/2069-git-large-file-storage-v1-0

Github's LFS reached its v1.0 milestone earlier this month! This means it's no longer in beta and is generally available to anyone who wants to give it a try. If you're on Github's free tier, you get 1GB of storage and 1GB/mo of bandwidth for LFS for free. Other plans are available for purchase.

I haven't tried it yet, but this seems to solve the biggest problem for gamedevs using git for version control: repo bloat due to large binary files. Once my current project gets a little bigger, I'll probably give it a try!

Edit 1: it looks like it's possible to set up your own LFS backend so that it's not tied to Github.

Edit 2: it seems like a better title for this post would have been "Git Large File Storage (LFS) now generally available"; it looks like Github's implementation can be used in a git environment not tied to Github at all!

I am going to start a blog to start getting myself out there more as a developer, and I have this GitLab server that I have set up to store my Unreal projects inexpensively. I see people asking semi-regularly about storage / VCS and how to do it cheaply.

Would a tutorial for this be helpful? I just saw that GitHub is changing their LFS pricing to scale better, and my solution costs about the same for most projects, unless you already have a domain to use.

I pay for 750GB LFS data packs on GitHub Team and can't push any file greater than 4 GB.

Why is this limitation in place? It's one of the reasons why people choose Perforce over Git for any kind of development that requires bigger files (gamedev, simulation, LLMs, ...)

I've recently wanted to start using github for a certian project but im certian that the project will be 30+gb and was wondering if github has set a limit to how large a repo can be?

Thanks in advance!

We want to use git lfs for it's locking capabilities.But the binary files we have are less in size(1-2mb) but there are more of them(50-60) and they will get changed frequently. Will adopting it for the above use case be better or is there any drawbacks to git lfs.