I have an hourly cron job that rsyncs my code folder to another one with venv, node_modules, Rust target directory etc. excluded. I only back up that folder. That cuts out most pointless small files and saves a lot of space too. I haven’t had much problem with .git folders because (1) I can only work so fast so the delta is usually fairly small; (2) periodic rsync cuts out a lot of intermediate changes. But if you still need to optimize, maybe you could repack .git too.