title: Why is a cloned repo 10x larger than a fetched repo?
body: <p>We have a remote repo that has exploded in size (1.4G to 14G). We are trying to work out why this repo has increased in size and fix the problem. </p>
  
  <p>In the process we have noticed a significant difference between git clone and git fetch.</p>
  
  <p>If we clone the repo, the cloned repo is also 14G. </p>
  
  <pre><code>git clone &lt;remote&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If instead, we init and fetch from the remote, the local repo is back to the expected 1.4G.</p>
  
  <pre><code>git init
  git remote add origin &lt;remote&gt;
  git fetch
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I think those two sets of commands should be similar if not the same.</p>
  
  <p>This indicates a significant difference between clone and fetch. How are these commands different?</p>
  
  <p>We are looking for ways of determining a fix for the remote. </p>
  
  <p>Note that the remote is on a github enterprise server, so we have limited access to the remote repo.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>Some additional statistics</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ git clone git@$REMOTE/main.git .
  Initialized empty Git repository in $HOME/cloned/.git/
  remote: Counting objects: 439172, done.
  remote: Compressing objects: 100% (238472/238472), done.
  Receiving objects: 100% (439172/439172), 13.82 GiB | 19.92 MiB/s, done.
  remote: Total 439172 (delta 186192), reused 436323 (delta 183501)
  Resolving deltas: 100% (186192/186192), done.
  </code></pre>
  
  <hr>
  
  <pre><code>$ git fetch
  remote: Counting objects: 246663, done.
  remote: Compressing objects: 100% (80057/80057), done.
  remote: Total 246663 (delta 159364), reused 238800 (delta 153402)
  Receiving objects: 100% (246663/246663), 1.13 GiB | 12.25 MiB/s, done.
  Resolving deltas: 100% (159364/159364), done.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Those are some pretty different numbers.</p>