Ask HN: How do you handle OSS project with private artifacts?

Hi, I don't have a long history as OSS builder but I'm now focusing on a project which is keeping me busy and I want to maintain it in the long term.

The problem I'm facing is that I have the OSS part (code, public docs, etc) but also some private assets (private docs primarily, my personal notes, AI iterations, etc) which I don't want to push publicly. At the same time I don't want to keep the private stuff local only as they are valuable assets and they might get lost, so gitignore is not a solution.

So I am now maintaining 2 repos, one private and one public, I push to private then with a script I copy over (public) assets into the public one. But this is a lot of overhead and it's giving me headaches for many reasons.

Have you ever faced this before? What could be a smooth solution?

Cheers