git doesn't like big files when pushing

I have a mail archive stored with git, in mbox form, and I made some
changes to a few of the files and checked them back in.

That worked fine, but when I went to push the stuff to my server, I got
the following errors:

$ git push origin
updating 'refs/heads/master'
  from 490badd9bec9ada3a21be275c97fb2a3a390f49e
  to   16be8985abc8a9c89ad2cc8f46a0d8e9786e832f
Generating pack...
Done counting 8 objects.
Deltifying 8 objects.
fatal: Out of memory, malloc failed
fatal: early EOF
unpack unpacker exited with error code
ng refs/heads/master n/a (unpacker error)


And here are the file sizes of the files that were changed:
$ ls -lh linux-usb-devel.save.200*
-rw-r--r-- 1 greg users 41M Jan  6 14:30 linux-usb-devel.save.2001
-rw-r--r-- 1 greg users 80M Jan  6 14:30 linux-usb-devel.save.2002
-rw-r--r-- 1 greg users 74M Jan  6 14:30 linux-usb-devel.save.2003
-rw-r--r-- 1 greg users 99M Jan  6 14:30 linux-usb-devel.save.2004
-rw-r--r-- 1 greg users 89M Jan  6 14:30 linux-usb-devel.save.2005

So, am I just foolish for trying to use git for this?  Should I just go
back to using rsync to back stuff like this up with?

thanks,

greg k-h