How to purge a huge file from commits history in Git?

Question

Occasionally I dropped a DVD-rip into a website project, then carelessly git commit -a -m ..., and, zap, the repo was bloated by 2.2 gigs. Next time I made some edits, deleted the video file, and commited everything, but the compressed file is still there in the repository, in history.

I know I can start branches from those commits and rebase one branch onto another. But what should I do to merge together the 2 commits so that the big file didn't show in the history and were cleaned in garbage collection procedure?

Answer 1

This article should help you http://help.github.com/removing-sensitive-data/

Answer 2

I had a similar problem with bulky binary test data from a Subversion import and wrote about removing data from a git repository.