Git-Annex

https://git-annex.branchable.com/

64•keepamovin•3h ago

Comments

EmilStenstrom•1h ago

Happy to see use cases front and center in command line documentation. They seem to always start with ”obscure command flag that you’ll probably never use”.

ygritte•1h ago

Could this be abused to simulate something like SVN externals? I always found git submodules to be a very bad replacement for that.

fragmede•1h ago

GitHub really embraced the Microsoft-esque NIH with LFS, instead of adopting git-annex.

keepamovin•1h ago

To its absolute detriment

Here is a talk by a person who adores it: Yann Büchau: Staying in Control of your Scientific Data with Git Annex https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdRUsn-zB2s

codemac•1h ago

While Yann has built many things with git-annex, we should be clear that the creator of git-annex is relatively singular, Joey Hess.

keepamovin•1h ago

Here is a comment about Joey: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14908529

And an interview When power is low, I often hack in the evenings by lantern light. https://usesthis.com/interviews/joey.hess/

mathstuf•1h ago

While I also find git-annex more elegant, its cross-platform story is weaker. Note that LFS was originally a collaboration between GitHub and Bitbucket (maybe? Some forge vendor I think). One had the implementation and the other had the name. They met at a Git conference and we have what we have today. My main gripes these days are the woefully inadequate limits GitHub has in place for larger projects. Coupled with the "must have all objects locally to satisfy an arbitrary push", any decently sized developer community will blow the limit fairly quickly.

FD: I have contributed to git-lfs.

andrewmcwatters•1h ago

git-annex has some really awkward documentation.

You can apparently do, sort of, but not really, the same thing git-fetch-file[1] does, with git-annex:

    git fetch-file add https://github.com/icculus/physfs.git "**" lib/physfs-main
    git fetch-file pull

`add` creates this at `.git-remote-files`:

    [file "**"]
    commit = 9d18d36b5a5207b72f473f05e1b2834e347d8144
    target = lib/physfs-main
    repository = https://github.com/icculus/physfs
    branch = main

But git-annex's documentation goes on and on about a bunch of commands I don't really want to read about, whereas those two lines and that .git-remote-files manifest just told you what git-fetch-file does.

[1]: https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/git-fetch-file

nolist_policy•1h ago

Not at all. git-annex is for managing large files in git and unlike git-lfs it preserves the distributed nature of git.

keepamovin•36m ago

Here is a guide you might like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0eVyhv2rbk

nolist_policy•1h ago

I use git-annex to manage all my data on all my drives. It automatically keeps track of which files are on which drives, it ensures that there are enough copies and it checksums everything. It works perfectly with offline drives.

git-annex can be a bit hard to grasp, so I suggest to create a throw-away repository, following the walkthrough[1] and try things out. See also workflows[2].

[1] https://git-annex.branchable.com/walkthrough/

[2] https://git-annex.branchable.com/workflow/

albertzeyer•18m ago

How much data do you have? I'm using git-annex on my photos, and that are around 100k-1M files, several TB of data, on a ZFS. In the beginning, everything was fine, but it starts to become increasingly slow, such that every operation takes several minutes (5-30 mins or so).

I wonder a bit whether that is ZFS, or git-annex, or maybe my disk, or sth else.

Munksgaard•46m ago

Git-Annex is a cool piece of technology, but my impression is that it works best for single-user repositories. So for instance, as @nolist_policy described in a sibling comment, managing all your personal files, documents, music, etc. across many different devices.

I tried using it for syncing large files in a collaborative repository, and the use of "magic" branches didn't seem to scale well.

ttiurani•46m ago

Relevant discussion 9 days ago about the new native git large object promisers in "The future of large files in Git is Git":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44916783

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Git-Annex

Comments

What Are OKLCH Colors?

Bro, ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

Git-Annex

MCP Gateway and Registry

Busy beaver hunters reach numbers that overwhelm ordinary math

Show HN: Sping – An HTTP/TCP latency tool that's easy on the eye

In-Memory Filesystems in Rust

From Hackathon to YC

The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

We put a coding agent in a while loop

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YouTube used AI to edit videos without telling users

The two versions of Parquet

A bubble that knows it's a bubble

Burner Phone 101

Trees on city streets cope with drought by drinking from leaky pipes

Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs

A Brilliant and Nearby One-off Fast Radio Burst Localized to 13 pc Precision

Cloudflare incident on August 21, 2025

Everything I know about good API design

Ghrc.io appears to be malicious

Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock

Show HN: Clearcam – Add AI object detection to your IP CCTV cameras

Claim: GPT-5-pro can prove new interesting mathematics

Show HN: I Built a XSLT Blog Framework

Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups

Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus (2021)

Stepanov's biggest blunder? The curious case of adjacent difference

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