Data Version Control¶

DVC runs alongside git and uses the current commit hash to version control the data.

Initialize the dvc repository:

$ dvc init

To start tracking a file or directory, use dvc add:

$ dvc add data/ImageNet

DVC stores information about the added file (or a directory) in a special .dvc file named data/ImageNet.dvc, a small text file with a human-readable format. This file can be easily versioned like source code with Git, as a placeholder for the original data (which gets listed in .gitignore):

git add data/ImageNet.dvc data/.gitignore
git commit -m "Add raw data"

Making changes¶

When you make a change to a file or directory, run dvc add again to track the latest version:

$ dvc add data/ImageNet

Switching between versions¶

The regular workflow is to use git checkout first to switch a branch, checkout a commit, or a revision of a .dvc file, and then run dvc checkout to sync data:

$ git checkout <...>
$ dvc checkout

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