How to manage a standalone media folder?

Managing my WordPress installation with Git is great. I get to deploy fixes via command line (with Capistrano), easy rollback plan, the Theme folder is a standalone project added as a submodule — This seems like a good way to handle WordPress’ and its plugins rapid updates.

However, Source Control is not right for handling the on-growing Uploads folder under wp-content folder.

The solution, IMHO, was to create a dedicated part on my server for media, and exclude it from the project itself. This way, I can backup media in a standalone process, deploy new version without having to clone the entire 300MB folder again and again — in short, this seems like a good solution.

WordPress doesn’t do that, though. Not out of the box.

Possible solutions:

• Uploads files via FTP and use the image URL in posts (doubles the posting process time)

• Use a 3rd party image hosting (Flickr, Tumblr) — This creates a dependency I wish to avoid. I want the media on my server, under my control.

Any other ideas? How can I achieve a standalone media folder to which I can upload files from WP dashboard?

Would some form of this solution work? Capistrano: Managing an uploads folder describes a way to update the symlink when deploying so you don’t lose the uploads folder.