Purging Git LFS history (storage billing)

Forward-only deletes of model/TTS binaries shrink future clones but do not reduce GitHub LFS storage charges. GitHub bills for every unique LFS object still reachable from the remote until those objects are purged.

Do this only after the fetch-based workflow (scripts/fetch-voice-assets.sh) is on the default branch and the team agrees to a force-push + re-clone.

Preconditions

1. All removed LFS paths are gone from main (or your default branch).
2. Contributors can bootstrap with scripts/fetch-voice-assets.sh all.
3. Announce a freeze: no pushes until rewrite + purge complete.
4. Ensure you have org admin rights and a backup clone (git clone --mirror).

Rewrite history (strip LFS payloads)

From a fresh mirror clone:

git clone --mirror [email protected]:moonshine-ai/moonshine.git moonshine-lfs-purge.git
cd moonshine-lfs-purge.git

# Export listed paths out of LFS / remove their blobs from history.
# Adjust the path list to match what was deleted from HEAD.
git lfs migrate export --everything \
  --include="core/moonshine-tts/data/**,\
examples/**/tts-data/**,\
test-assets/**/*.ort,\
test-assets/tiny-en/tokenizer.bin,\
test-assets/tiny-streaming-en/**,\
python/src/moonshine_voice/assets/tiny-en/*.ort,\
android/java/androidTest/assets/tiny-en/*"

Alternatively use git filter-repo with --path / --path-glob removals for the same trees, then git lfs prune.

Force-push all refs (coordinate with the org):

git push --force --all
git push --force --tags

Every clone and fork must re-clone; old remotes will disagree on history.

Request a GitHub LFS purge

Rewriting history orphans LFS objects but does not free billed storage until GitHub deletes them. Open a ticket with GitHub Support asking to purge orphaned LFS objects for moonshine-ai/moonshine after the force-push.

Include:

• Repository name
• Approximate time of the force-push
• Confirmation that history was rewritten and old LFS pointers are gone

Verify

git lfs ls-files | wc -l   # should be ~ORT libs + embedded .cpp only
du -sh .git/lfs            # local cache; prune with: git lfs prune

Check the org’s GitHub LFS storage graph after Support confirms the purge.