Summary
Does git natively support local repositories stored inside single file?
Motivation
I have many usecases, where I use git primarily for change-tracking on local files, which are synchronized over Dropbox/Spideroak and in some cases rsync between multiple machines. Many of these directories are small (1 to 10 files), while the .git directories contain approximately 40 files after garbage collection.
This results in major file clutter, as in many cases there are ten times more files in the .git directory than there are versioned files, which slows down backups. For Dropbox/SpiderOak it introduces the risk of accidentally shutting down the client machine while only some of the repository files have been synchronized, thus putting an inconsistent repository on the other machines, which is significantly harder to resolve than accidentally working with an outdated version of the complete repository.
These problems would be avoided, if it were possible to store the local git repository in a single file instead of a large directory tree. I probably could easily solve this myself (using a zip/unzip wrapper around the git command), but I was wondering if there are more convenient / officially supported options (e.g. alternate file formats for the local repository).