How can I resume a git history rewrite?

Question

I\'m rewriting the history of a fairly big repo using git filter-branch --tree-filter and it\'s taking a few hours. I see that git is using a temporary director

Answer 1

Roberto mentioned this in his answer, but I want to give a benchmark for it: If your git filter-branch operation is taking to long to complete, consider an AWS high memory instance.

I once had to filter-branch and merge together 35 different repositories, each with two years of dozens-of-commits-per-day history. My script failed to complete in 25 hours on my laptop. It completed in 45 minutes on an m2.4xlarge instance in Amazon.

Total cost?

$1.64 -- less than I spend on a 20oz soda.

BFG sounds like a great tool and I'd encourage anyone who routinely rewrites history to try it out. But if you just need something to work and have easy access to AWS, filter-branch is trivially easy.

In 2016 this is even cheaper. Just mosey on over to the Spot Advisor and find yourself something of the "cluster compute for $0.30 / hour variety.