Large Files in Source Control (TFS)

Question

Recently at the office we have been talking about placing large files into our TFS repository. The files themselves are XML, usually 100-200MB in size, and sometimes as lar

Answer 1

The biggest problem (inconvenience) you'll have is having to download these massive files to all your workspaces, or map them out. Consider putting them into a separate team project to make this easier (unless you want to include them in branches, in which case I'd abuse keeping everything in one team project)

If you have control of the xml format then also consider a few tweaks to make them smaller. This will improve performance of store/get operations and also loading speed... Shorten element and attribute names, reduce the number of decimal places you are outputting for floating point numbers, etc. You will find threat simple schemes like this will knock many megabytes off the size of Gb-sized files, and it's easy to knock up a quick xslt transform or code to convert the files quickly over to the new format.