How to remove unreferenced blobs from my git repo

Question

I have a GitHub repo that had two branches - master & release.

The release branch contained binary distribution files that were contributing to a very large repo

Answer 1

Each time your HEAD moves, git tracks this in the reflog. If you removed commits, you still have "dangling commits" because they are still referenced by the reflog for ~30 days. This is the safety-net when you delete commits by accident.

You can use the git reflog command remove specific commits, repack, etc.., or just the high level command:

git gc --prune=now