title: Clone / Checkout specific directories
body: <p>I am aware of sparseCheckout, but this still is causing issues for me.</p>
  
  <p>I have a repo that is about 200GB in size with over 60 thousand commits. This means that cloning it takes a huge amount of time due to the huge file size and lengthy history.</p>
  
  <p>Following the steps to start an empty repo and then add the remote origin, adding the origin took 20 minutes and has used over 10GB of disk space.</p>
  
  <p>There must be a better way to do this that doesn't take so long and won't use up my disk space?</p>
  
  <p>All I want to do is squash some commits in a branch so that one of our bots will approve the commits (PR) before I can merge (this is why I can't just squash and merge through GH).</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas please?</p>
  
  <p>Note: I don't believe a shallow copy is of any help here as the repo is still 10GB at HEAD which I want to avoid cloning completely.</p>