Handling digital media masters
Master files - either original sources or as close as possible - are precious and should be carefully tracked.
Digital media files - e.g. photos, videos, music - are often large and binary encoded, which poses special challenges for their tracking.
Git-annex
Digital media masters are tracked with git and git-annex.
Git is a version control system - a repository for historic versions of file contents of a folder. Git-annex is an extension to git, better at handling large files.
Conceptually, git-annex tracks changes to data same as git, but where git tracks the contents of files, git-annex instead tracks file checksums into git, moving aside the actual data (to an "annex") and tracks which annex currently holds data with which checksums.