Building GitHub-Inspired Version Control and Forking Without Duplicating Project Files

One of the challenges I faced while building my LaTeX Writer project was implementing version control and project forking in a storage-efficient way. A typical LaTeX project contains multiple files. Even a simple project usually has a "main.tex" file, bibliography files, images, style files, and other supporting documents. If I stored a complete copy of every file for every version or fork, storage requirements would grow rapidly. Imagine a project with four files and ten versions. Storing the entire project for every version would mean storing the same files repeatedly, even when only one line changed. Forking would create an even bigger problem because every fork would require another complete copy of the project. Instead of accepting this inefficiency, I started researching how large platforms solve the same problem. GitHub was the obvious inspiration. Learning from GitHub GitHub does not store a complete copy of a repository every time a change is made. Instead, it stores content separately and uses references to connect files, commits, and repositories. This idea became the foundation for my own implementation. Project Structure Whenever a new project is created, a default file called "main.tex" is generated automatically. The project itself does not directly contain file contents. Instead, it stores metadata such as: Project ID Owner ID Root Folder ID File References Each file also has its own metadata record containing: File ID File Name Blob ID Project ID Owner ID Folder ID The actual content is not stored inside the file metadata. Instead, the content lives inside a separate entity called a Blob. Loading a Project When the editor loads a project, it reconstructs the directory structure using metadata. The process works like this: Retrieve the project's Root Folder ID. Find all folders belonging to that folder hierarchy. Find all files belonging to each folder. Build the directory tree for the frontend. Because files and folders are stored independently, the