large(25G) repository in git

We maintain a website in git. This website has a bunch of backend server code, and a bunch of data files. Alot of these files are full videos.

We use git, so that the distributed nature of website development can be supported. Quite often, you'll have a production server, with online changes occurring(we support in-browser editting of content), a preview server, where large-scale code changes can be previewed, then a development server, one per programmer(or more).

Last friday, I was doing a checkin on the production server, and found 1.6G of new files. git was quite able at committing that. However, pushing was problematic. I was pushing over ssh; so, a new ssh connection was open to the preview server. After doing so, git tried to create a new pack file. This took *ages*, and the ssh connection died. So did git, when it finally got done with the new pack, and discovered the ssh connection was gone.

So, to work around that, I ran git gc. When done, I discovered that git repacked the *entire* repository. While not something I care for, I can understand that, and live with it. It just took *hours* to do so.

Then, what really annoys me, is that when I finally did the push, it tried sending the single 27G pack file, when the remote already had 25G of the repository in several different packs(the site was an hg->git conversion). This part is just unacceptable.

So, here are my questions/observations:

1: Handle the case of the ssh connection dying during git push(seems simple).

2: Is there an option to tell git to *not* be so thorough when trying to find similiar files. videos/doc/pdf/etc aren't always very deltafiable, so I'd be happy to just do full content compares.

3: delta packs seem to be poorly done. it seems that if one repo gets repacked completely, that the entire new pack gets sent, when the target has most of the objects already.

4: Are there any config options I can set to help in this? There are tons of options, and some documentation as to what each one does, but no recommended practices type doc, that describes what should be done for different kinds of workflows.

ps: Thank you for your time.  I hope that someone has answers for me.

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