cleaning git history with BFG

As I recently tried to push my commits to github, I got the same error message as in this question. I removed the files from my repository but now have to clean up the history. As advised in the answers I looked into BFG, which seems to be the solution. While reading through the instructions it starts with using git --mirror link-to-remote-repo.

Now I am wondering, because I couldn't push the newest commit yet and probably my local commit history is longer than the one on github. Furthermore I am unsure as all the work I did is on a branch and not on master and how it affects my repository.

Solution

Manual solution (based on cheery pick)

EDIT: Before you start please commit or stash your local changes.

Let's say we have two branches master and dev which have common commit with SHA1 = X. Branch dev contains commits A1, A2, ..., A16

git checkout dev
git checkout -b new-dev
git reset --hard X

For each commit in dev (A1, ..., A16):

git cherry-pick A1 --no-commit
Check you index with git status
Remove your problematic binary files from the index git reset HEAD myfolder/mybinary.rpm
delete the file git rm myfolder/mybinary.rpm