Git is cool, for reasons I won't go into here.

It doesn't deal very well with very large files, but that's fine; when using things like git-annex or git-lfs, it's possible to deal with very large files.

But what if you've added a file to git-lfs which didn't need to be there? Let's say you installed git-lfs and told it to track all *.zip files, but then it turned out that some of those files were really small, and that the extra overhead of tracking them in git-lfs is causing a lot of grief with your users. What do you do now?

With git-annex, the solution is simple: you just run git annex unannex <filename>, and you're done. You may also need to tell the assistant to no longer automatically add that file to the annex, but beyond that, all is well.

With git-lfs, this works slightly differently. It's not much more complicated, but it's not documented in the man page. The naive way to do that would be to just run git lfs untrack; but when I tried that it didn't work. Instead, I found that the following does work:

• First, edit your .gitattributes files, so that the file which was (erroneously) added to git-lfs is no longer matched against a git-lfs rule in your .gitattributes.
• Next, run git rm --cached <file>. This will tell git to mark the file as removed from git, but crucially, will retain the file in the working directory. Dropping the --cached will cause you to lose those files, so don't do that.
• Finally, run git add <file>. This will cause git to add the file to the index again; but as it's now no longer being smudged up by git-lfs, it will be committed as the normal file that it's supposed to be.