Is there a way to not copy unchanged static files to build folder?

my site contains up to 80GB of static files. they are mostly untoched when I build my site. However since jekyll copies all of the static files to build folder each time we build the website, it takes so much time for all of the files to be copied again and again. Is there a way to prevent this?

you could use gulp to manage them. I do that with sass/js/images, works great. That is a lot of data.

something I wrote on gulp/jekyll a while back:

https://rdyar.github.io/2017/10/01/speed-up-jekyll-by-using-gulp-for-sass-and-other-assets/

Whoa! that is a lot of data!!
While @rdyar’s recommendation of delegating to Gulp still stands, have you considered optimizing your assets for the Web?

You may want to consider the following (where applicable to your site’s usage):

  • reducing the image-resolution of images and photographs to those actually used (e.g. when using a 1024x768 graphic to render as 800x600 image, etc)
  • cropping image sizes
  • hosting videos externally on sites like YouTube, etc
  • using CDN to deliver resources

I recently find out about --incremental flag. I thought it might help my problem. However I’m experiencing something weird which I explained here:

with this flag, shouldn’t jekyll try not to transfer unchanged static files to _site?