On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 08:31:35AM +0000, Kerry, Richard wrote: > I would like to move some files, from the project in which they have > always resided into a new project. I would like to keep all their > history. I don't want to waste space by also moving the rest of the > old project's history, or historical file contents. Try git-filter-branch's --subdirectory repository, which is designed to do exactly this. Or the much newer (and faster) git-filter-repo: https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo > Do I create a new branch, then delete the rest of main-system leaving > only what I want? Surely if I do that then I would end up with all > the main-system file data within the new repo, which would expand its > size. Is there a recommended way to extract certain files with their > histories? Correct; just deleting files and creating a new commit will still carry them in the history. You have to rewrite the old commits. -Peff
