Taken from Git Tower's excellent online help:

Working with large binary files can be quite a hassle: they bloat your local repository and leave you with Gigabytes of data on your machine. Most annoyingly, the majority of this huge amount of data is probably useless for you: most of the time, you don't need each and every version of a file on your disk.

This problem in mind, Git's standard feature set was enhanced with the “Large File Storage” extension - in short: “Git LFS”. An LFS-enhanced local Git repository will be significantly smaller in size because it breaks one basic rule of Git in an elegant way: it does not keep all of the project's data in your local repository.

  $ git lfs install

  $ git lfs track "*.vip"

  $ git add .gitattributes
  $ git add some-package.vip
  $ git commit -m "Add VI Package file"

Sometimes, LFS will not behave as expected. In some cases, moving to the command line will solve the issue. The following steps are taken from the git lfs GitHub page:

  // Skip smudge - We'll download binary files later in a faster batch
  git lfs install --skip-smudge
  
  // Do git clone here
  git clone ...
  
  // Fetch all the binary files in the new clone
  git lfs pull
  
  // Reinstate smudge
  git lfs install --force

• https://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes
• https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/git/lfs/