Large file issue when pushing to GitHub persists despite not committing

[laurahspencer]

I ran into a very irritating issue when pushing local repo changes to GitHub, and am sharing with you all in case you also encounter it. Here's a narrative.

Some of my files saved locally to a git repo changed from being <100MB to >100MB, which means they were too large to push to GitHub. I didn't stage them for the commit (i.e. did not include them in my git add command), but somehow after I committed and then pushed to github I encountered that large file error, keeping me from completing the push. I tried my typical tactics - which is to add those files to the .gitignore and undo the last commit via git reset --soft HEAD~1, undo git add by git reset, then re-add files individually to make sure I hadn't added large ones. This still didn't work. I then tried something new to try to remove the large files from all git history - which I do NOT recommend - using git filter-branch to delete all history of those large files. This created a HUGE issue - it essentially made a mirror of my repo that was ~330 commits ahead of the master, and to pull or push I needed to fix a bunch of merge issues. I think I neglected to do a follow-up command, which would have force pushed all my changes to the master, but in any case the git filter was not the route to go.

I ultimately re-cloned the master to start fresh, and then found a solution 1) undo latest commit 2) then git reset to unstage files, then 3) use git rm --cached filexample.txt to remove each large file from git but retain the actual files (here cached was important, b/c it wouldn't let me do the removal otherwise since the files were also saved on the master).

Hope this helps someone