How to Stop Tracking Data

There are situations where you may want to "un-track" files or directories added in error to DVC.

Expand to add a sample data data.csv file

dvc add creates a .dvc file to track the file, and lists it in .gitignore:

$ dvc add data.csv

$ ls
data.csv    data.csv.dvc
$ cat .gitignore
/data.csv

Let's undo dvc add with dvc remove. This deletes the .dvc file (and corresponding .gitignore entry). The data file is now no longer being tracked after this:

$ dvc remove data.csv.dvc

$ git status
    Untracked files:
        data.csv

You can run dvc gc with the -w option to remove the data (and all of it's previous versions, if any) from the cache:

$ dvc gc -w

Note that a very similar procedure works for dvc.yaml stages and their outputs.

How to Stop Tracking Data

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