[ntoshev]

I guess the reason he can't do the same with vmware images is that git is slow with huge files. On the other hand, vmware snapshots should allow what he wants - to keep several closely related versions of the system and the ability to start any of them. Am I missing something?

[blasdel]

Why the hell would you want to version and branch and merge one huge blob? The point of this is that it's versioned just like it was a straightforward filesystem mount.

You can't take forked vmware snapshots and merge them back into one another, or track changes from their shared parent, or anything less primitive than vanilla snapshots.

[nuclear_eclipse]

I've tried this before with a VirtualBox image of XP. Even the base install of XP, without any updates or added software, is too large for Git to handle, or at least too large on my machine with 2GB of RAM.

[ntoshev]

According to this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=374416

Git is particularly bad for large files, while good old SVN handles them Ok.

[blasdel]

And CVS handles them far better than SVN.