At least git stores its local copy of the repository compressed -- svn keeps a second uncompressed copy of the current revision, to be able to run a diff. So n

At least git stores its local copy of the repository compressed -- svn keeps a second uncompressed copy of the current revision, to be able to run a diff. So neither are great for large binaries, although at least subversion will only grab the latest. But use of compression and binary deltas does mean that (for regular text-based code) a git checkout including all history can be smaller than a subversion checkout with just the latest version.