I'm not sure if this is my stupidity or if it's a bug, but

git annex copy --force --to REMOTE . 

just zip's through really quickly and doesn't actually force a copy to a remote location. This is just following up on the ?git-annex directory hashing problems on osx. I want to just do a force copy of all my data to my portable disk to really make sure that the data is really there. I would similarly would want to make sure I can force a

git annex copy --force --from REMOTE .

to pull down files from a remote.