Zip file much larger than story

I'm having an issue where the ZIP file is sooooo much larger than the story.  It's caused because I'm linking to practice files on my server, which are quite large. So if I go into the Storyline output > story_content folder there is a folder called external_files which is the culprit.  I tried deleting that, but the course won't work in my LMS.

Couple of questions.  If I'm using an external server, why the heck is it grabbing and packaging the files within the course?  One of my main reasons for doing this is so I can change the content on the server and NOT have to reupload the course.  I can only assume this is not correct, since it appears to be working off the packaged files, not accessing the server each time.

Is there a better way to do this?  In addition to the updating issue, it's causing a zip file size upload issue with my LMS.