How to complete a git clone for a big project on an unstable connection?

Two solutions (or rather workarounds) that come to mind are:

• Use shallow clone i.e. git clone --depth=1, then deepen this clone using git fetch --depth=N, with increasing N. You can use git fetch --unshallow (since 1.8.0.3) to download all remaining revisions.

• Ask somebody to bundle up to some tagged release (see git-bundle(1) manpage). The bundle itself is an ordinary file, which you can download any way, via HTTP/FTP with resume support, via BitTorrent, via rsync, etc. The you can create clone from bundle, fix configuration, and do further fetches from official LibreOffice repository.

I don't think this is ready yet. There's an old GSoC page that which planned to implement your desired feature. My best bet is, like you suggested download it as a directory. I'm assuming you are able to resume downloads over other protocols.

Restartable Clone

When cloning a large repository (such as KDE, Open Office, Linux kernel) there is currently no way to restart an interrupted clone. It may take considerable time for a user on the end of a small pipe to download the data, and if the clone is interrupted in the middle the user currently needs to start over from the beginning and try again. For some users this may make it impossible to clone a large repository.

Goal: Allow git-clone to automatically resume a previously failed download over the native git:// protocol. Language: C Mentor: Shawn Pearce Suggested by: Shawn Pearce on gmane

Update

Along with the shallow cloning (git clone --depth=1) suggestion in one of the other answers it may be helpful if someone can make a bare repository for you if you can communicate with the provider. You can easily convert the bare repository to a full repository. Also read the comments in that answer as a shallow clone may not always help.

This method uses 3rd party server.

First, do git clone --bare, then rsync -v -P -e ssh user@host:repo.git . You can use msys under Windows.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a carrier pigeon and a bundle of SD cards" would be the modern form of this answer. Tar it up, plain old cp -a it, whatever, and mail the damn thing. Find someone willing to take two minutes of their time to drop a thumb drive into an SASE. Find a contact, there, they might even do it for you.