When you checkout a commit that contains Git LFS pointers, they are replaced with files from your local Git LFS cache, or downloaded from the remote Git LFS store. When you push new commits to the server, any Git LFS files referenced by the newly pushed commits are transferred from your local Git LFS cache to the remote Git LFS store tied to your Git repository. When you add a file to your repository, Git LFS replaces its contents with a pointer, and stores the file contents in a local Git LFS cache.

During normal usage, you'll never see these pointer files as they are handled automatically by Git LFS: Git LFS does this by replacing large files in your repository with tiny pointer files. Specifically, large files are downloaded during the checkout process rather than during cloning or fetching. Git LFS (Large File Storage) is a Git extension developed by Atlassian, GitHub, and a few other open source contributors, that reduces the impact of large files in your repository by downloading the relevant versions of them lazily.

For projects containing large files, particularly large files that are modified regularly, this initial clone can take a huge amount of time, as every version of every file has to be downloaded by the client. Git is a distributed version control system, meaning the entire history of the repository is transferred to the client during the cloning process.

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