Does the Merkle tree structure help with deduplication across repositories?
Yes. When you clone a repository, Git downloads pack files containing deduplicated objects by their hash. Two repositories with identical files store one copy per hash value. Pack files use delta compression within objects and can be transferred between repos. This is why Git repositories can be remarkably space-efficient compared to storing snapshots.
Answered in
Merkle Trees: How Git Detects Changes in MillisecondsGit hashes files into nested cryptographic trees to skip unchanged directories in one comparison, finding changes across millions of files faster than scanning.
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