[beagle3]

What does "take version out of the repository first" mean?

You can do a "git checkout" to get a copy out. On a modern drive, checking out a hundred meg history takes a few seconds.

You do not need multiple copies on the disk at the same time - "git checkout v1" when you are working on v2 will do only the changes necessary to make your directory into "v1", and then you can do "git checkout v2" or "git checkout v3" to get another version.

Alternatively, you can just mount your git repo as a filesystem, e.g. https://github.com/davesque/gitfuse (there are other projects - this came up on search, never used it myself).

And anecdotally, my git repos with tens of branches tend to take much less space than one checkout. git is super efficient about storage.