When the XetHub crew joined Hugging Face this fall, @erinys and I started brainstorming how to share our work to replace Git LFS on the Hub. Uploading and downloading large models and datasets takes precious time. That’s where our chunk-based approach comes in.
Instead of versioning files (like Git and Git LFS), we version variable-sized chunks of data. For the Hugging Face community, this means:
⏩ Only upload the chunks that changed. 🚀 Download just the updates, not the whole file. 🧠 We store your file as deduplicated chunks
In our benchmarks, we found that using CDC to store iterative model and dataset version led to transfer speedups of ~2x, but this isn’t just a performance boost. It’s a rethinking of how we manage models and datasets on the Hub.
We're planning on our new storage backend to the Hub in early 2025 - check out our blog to dive deeper, and let us know: how could this improve your workflows?