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

Before doing git filter-branch and git gc, you should review tags that are present in your repo. Any real system which has automatic tagging for things like continuous integration and deployments will make unwanted objects still referenced by these tags, hence gc can't remove them and you will still keep wondering why the size of repo is still so big.

The best way to get rid of all un-wanted stuff is to run git-filter & git gc and then push master to a new bare repo. The new bare repo will have the cleaned up tree.