It is good practice not to commit a data folder to version control if the data is available elsewhere and you do not want to track changes of the data. But do not forget to also add an entry for this folder to .gitignore because otherwise git iterates over all the files in the folder when checking for file changes, which may take a long time if there are many files.

For my latest project it took more than a minute to enumerate the untracked files in the data folder! Luckily, to help forgetful users like me, `git status` reports possible problems when things take longer than tolerable:

>>> git status
It took 73.59 seconds to enumerate untracked files.
See 'git help status' for information on how to improve this.
...

Adding the entry data/** for the data folder to .gitignore sped things up again.

References: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/getting-started-with-git/ignoring-files