Add a non-duplicating way of cloning models/datasets via LFS

[vadimkantorov]

With the vanilla instructions on https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1?clone=true,

The downloaded 600Gb will be extra-duplicated in the .git/lfs/objects. Yes, this is required for having a well-formed repo, but we can't contrib to DeepSeek repo anyway, so having a bit broken repo is acceptable, if this leads to avoiding duplicating hundreds of gigabytes on disk.

I discussed it with LFS folks here: https://github.com/git-lfs/git-lfs/discussions/6029

For now, here is my workaround example using hardlinks:

GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1 git clone https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1
cd DeepSeek-R1
git lfs fetch
git lfs ls-files -l | while read SHA DASH FILEPATH; do rm "$FILEPATH" && ln ".git/lfs/objects/${SHA:0:2}/${SHA:2:2}/$SHA" "$FILEPATH"; done

# git lfs ls-files -l | while read SHA DASH FILEPATH; do mv ".git/lfs/objects/${SHA:0:2}/${SHA:2:2}/$SHA" "$FILEPATH"; done

Given that HF is driving LFS usage for these giant models and datasets (and as this currently leads to duplication), maybe you could consider advertising this workaround in the ?clone=true popup?

Thanks!

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LFS don't like much the idea of opt-in usage of hard-links (currently they only try reflinks which are not supported by majority of Linux file-systems), but maybe if HF asks, they would accept such a PR for git-lfs pull or for git-lfs dedup adding an opt-in switch for using hardlinks and maybe making these files marked readonly...

[julien-c]

Hi @vadimkantorov, for context we are starting to move away from git-lfs and towards Xet: https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/xet

git-xet (the Xet integration in git command line) is still TODO at this point though. (cc @jsulz for viz)

[vadimkantorov]

One piece of feedback is that it can be important to have this downloader tool with as few dependencies as possible

[julien-c]

yes it will be packaged as a (lightweight) native binary similar to git-lfs, cc @rajatarya @jsulz