First off, the "block-level" sync is exactly what rsync is for. You'll probably have better results using that. (http://www.samba.org/rsync/ http://www.samba.or

First off, the "block-level" sync is exactly what rsync is for. You'll probably have better results using that. (http://www.samba.org/rsync/ http://www.samba.org/rsync/) You could track a list of local file paths in git, but sync the binaries themselves with rysnc. (They complement each other well.) Tracking changes in binary files (which cannot be merged in any reasonably generic fashion) is a fundamentally different issue than tracking changes in text, particularly source code. Git is designed to do the latter. While you can use it to track changes in binaries, merging doesn't make sense anymore, and hashing / scanning big binary files for changes is significantly slower. (A bunch of images generally won't matter, but I wouldn't use it to track, say, video, or large database dumps.)