Git Essentials ??? Second Edition - Second Edition

Git doesn't use deltas

Now it's time to investigate another well-known difference between Git and other versioning systems. Take Subversion as an example: when you do a new commit, Subversion creates a new numbered revision that only contains deltas between the previous one; this is a smart way to archive changes to files, especially among big text files, because if only a line of text changes, the size of the new commit will be much smaller.

Instead, in Git even if you change only a char in a big text file, it always stores a new version of the file: Git doesn't do deltas (at least not in this case), and every commit is actually a snapshot of the entire repository.

At this point, people usually exclaim: "Gosh, Git waste a large amount of ...