Git -lfs: fatal: unable to process files so big (4.3G)

Question

Using git -lfs / 1.1.0 (GitHub; linux 386; transition 1.5.1), file size 4.3G.

git init git lfs install git lfs track *.nnex 

.gitattributes: *.nnex filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text

git add evernote-backup.nnex : fatal: Cannot handle files this big

git lfs ls-files : Git can't resolve ref: "HEAD"

git lfs track : Listing tracked paths evernote-backup.nnex .gitattributes)

git lfs env :

 WARNING: Reading LFS config from ".gitconfig", not ".lfsconfig". Rename to ".lfsconfig" before Git LFS v2.0 to remove this warning. git-lfs/1.1.0 (GitHub; linux 386; go 1.5.1) git version 2.1.4 LocalWorkingDir=/home/vitaly LocalGitDir=/home/vitaly/.git LocalGitStorageDir=/home/vitaly/.git LocalMediaDir=/home/vitaly/.git/lfs/objects TempDir=/home/vitaly/.git/lfs/tmp ConcurrentTransfers=3 BatchTransfer=true git config filter.lfs.smudge = "git-lfs smudge %f" git config filter.lfs.clean = "git-lfs clean %f" 

I get the following error:

 git-lfs: fatal: Cannot handle files this big (4.3G) 

Answer 1

This is a 32-bit addressing problem on i386, and Git and git-lfs simply cannot address a file larger than 4 GB. The maximum value of a 32-bit unsigned integer is 4,294,967,295 , which goes up to about 4 GB.

We can see where this error occurs inside the Git source code in git-compat-util.h :

 744 static inline size_t xsize_t(off_t len) 745 { 746 if (len > (size_t) len) 747 die("Cannot handle files this big"); 748 return (size_t)len; 749 } 

I don't know enough about how git-lfs works internally to find out if this works.

If you work with a 64-bit ( x86_64 ) system, and not with the 32-bit ( i386 ) system that you are using, this is the option that will fix your problem. Alternatively, you can use git-annex instead of git-lfs with some success, but someone had a similar problem with git-annex . There is not enough information in the error report to know that there is still a problem in 32-bit systems.

Unfortunately, you have a general limitation on 32-bit hardware, and you will encounter many problems trying to process files larger than 4 GB on these systems. This is an update time!