How do i clean a bitbucket git branch after deleting it?

Question

So I have had three branches, master, test1, test2. Someone did something silly, and now test1 includes 1.4 gbyte of binary files. Ok, we dont need branch test1 anymore, so i go ahead and delete it from the Bitbucket gui interface for deleting branches. Branch is gone, but the whole repository is still 1.4 gbyte large. How do I clean that? The branch is gone...

Hayko Riemenschneider · Answer

Thanks! I've tried the "Garbage collecting dead data" from the maintaining info, but woah, dudes. It's 2015. Why do I have to take care of stuff I deleted? The other options dont work for me, because my branch is already gone in all ways I know how to see it. Yet the garbage collection didn't work.

Second, ok in about a week it'll be 30 days since this first occurred. Let's see what happens. Otherwise I just create a new repository and forget all old one...

thanks for your hints!

Tim Crall1 · Answer

When you delete a branch, the commits on it are still present until they eventually get cleaned up (usually 30 days).  If you're lucky, this may fix itself in a little bit of time.

You could also potentially clone the repo down, fix it using plumbing commands, delete the remote copy, and push your local copy back up making a new clean copy.

Look at this: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Maintenance-and-Data-Recovery

http://git-memo.readthedocs.org/en/latest/garbage_collecting.html

Nirmal Shankar · Answer

What can usually happen with git repo is when we just delete something, the actual files would be in the repo.

This would be a good read https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/maintaining-a-git-repository-321848291.html