Hello, I’ve been using UE4 for years, and for personal work, I’ve always just backed up projects intermittently to a hard drive. Professionally, I’ve worked on small teams using GitHub, but in junior positions. I’m now starting to lead projects and I feel like I need to actually learn to use Git and GitHub properly. I decided to try using GitHub with my next personal project to get more familiar with it…
One thing I perhaps didn’t grasp is that there seems to be costs involved almost immediately with using GitHub for UE4 development. GitHub seems to have a limit of 25mb for files before Lare File Storage (LFS) is needed to track and store versions of things like texture and model files. LFS has a monthly 1GB storage limit, and after that, it costs $5/month for 50GB storage.
I’ve installed Github Desktop with LFS and created a new project with starter content based on Unreal’s FPS Template, then added a few materials to a folder and pushed these changes to GitHub. Apparently, this now takes up 687mb on my GitHub webdisk (same size as the .git folder in my local Unreal project folder).
This looks like I’ll pretty soon be incurring costs. From previous experience, my Unreal projects have got up to around 20GB quite easily, but my disk storage needs on GitHub could be way more than that, going by this from the GitHub docs:
If you push a 500 MB file to Git LFS, you’ll use 500 MB of your allotted storage and none of your bandwidth. If you make a 1 byte change and push the file again, you’ll use another 500 MB of storage and no bandwidth, bringing your total usage for these two pushes to 1 GB of storage and zero bandwidth.
Basically, if I’m using and modifying an average project’s worth of textures, video, etc, heaven forbid anything like alembic files, it looks like I’m going to incur significant costs.
I wanted to ask whether I’ve got the right idea about how this is all supposed to work, and what people generally do to keep costs down?