Today I forgetfully left my USB drive at home when I took off for a night at the yurt. This has happened before and generally involves staring at an scp for rather too long, probably getting low on battery power in the process, and is followed by not quite having files in the places I expect and forgetting to delete them from my small laptop SSD later. With git-annex those annoyances can go away.

So I wanted a couple of gigabytes of files that were left at home behind a slightly slow link. Rather than scp them to my laptop for several hours, I just did a quick ssh into a server, and browsed through my stuff there, running git annex get $foo & on files and directories I wanted. Then went to eat dinner and play board games while the content was scped across the slow link from home.

Now I can quickly download it all to my laptop from that fast server (named "finch"), like this:

git pull
git annex move . --from finch

That removes the data from the server too, freeing its space back up for next time. And the files are in their regular places on my laptop, automatically. And I can simply git annex drop . when I need that space back without worrying about losing any data.

(Hmm, this feels a little bit like it did to switch from doing everything by hand with dpkg to using apt-get..)