Without looking at your scene, I will give the following advice :
+ "Key-> Bake animation" by default bakes simple key frames. That means basic transforms ( translation, rotation, scale ). Take 5 minutes and read about the options. And understand the difference between transforms and shapes.
+ "Key-> Bake animation" does have options for baking shapes but that is not efficient.
+ When people want to "bake" geometry, the generally use Alembic nowadays.
This distinction between transforms and shapes may seem arbitrary but it is smart. Imagine a helicopter with 1GB of vertices that are all moving through the sky without deformation. It is much more efficient to store per frame translation, scale, and rotation keys that "Key-> Bake animation" gives us. Alternatively, you could save the translation of every vertex but that means storing 1GB per frame! So for 100 frames, you are storing 100GB as opposed to 1.01GB.
But in your case, you have a deforming object so you need to store the translation of every vertex. Your options are Alembic, Maya's geo cache, or simply keeping your rig in the scene will do the job.
