Accidentally committed a large amount of raw data in Mercurial, how do I keep it from overloading my bitbucket repository?

Question

I copied a large amount of data from my labs file server to my laptop, then accidentally committed it to the Mercurial repository I\'m using to back up my thesis.

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Answer 1

I'm going to describe what I would do if I wanted to roll back two most recent commits.

I assume that you haven't pushed to Bitbucked yet. I also assume you have these changesets on top of your DAG:

o  C: Deleted files FILE1 and FILE2
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o  B: Some nice changes; also added large files FILE1 and FILE2
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o  A: Some good changeset

Here, C should be removed altogether, B should be edited (FILE1 and FILE2 additions should be rolled back), and A and below should be left as they are.

Caveat: this only works if B and C were not pushed onto Bitbucked (or any other public repo) yet.

You'll need to enable the MQ extension to do this. To do this, add these lines to the .hg/hgrc file in your repo:

[extensions]
mq=

Steps

First, I strip C:

$ hg strip C

Now, C is obliterated, and the parent is B. I import B as a Mercurial Queues patch to edit it:

$ hg qimport -r B -n B.patch

Now I have one patch on top our queue, which was created from B. I remove the big files, and refresh the patch:

$ hg forget FILE1 FILE2 
$ hg qrefresh

Now B.patch no longer includes the big files. However, they are still on the disk, albeit not controlled bu Mercurial. I now finish my work with MQ:

$ hg qfinish -a

Here's what I have at the moment:

o  B1: Some nice changes, no big files here
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o  A: Some good changeset