I use BTRFS, so have CoW and snapshots of the entire system which I transfer regularly to a backup box. Before dropping some content in the "working" instance of the repository, I thought to note availability of the keys in some backup snapshot(s) on a backup server. The difficulty is that those all would have the same git-annex UUID (since they are snapshots of the same "working one"), and internally git-annex would have availability marked based on that UUID so I guess that would not work as is.

So I am thinking (didn't try) to do the following dance:

  • make a "read-write" copy of the entire backup snapshot
  • git annex init the backup copy inthat snapshot to cause regeneration of UUID
  • run git annex fsck so git-annex annotates availability of those keys with that new UUID
  • make read-only snapshot of the read-write snapshot
  • add that read-only snapshot host:/path as a remote to the "working" instance.

Would that be "optimal" way or may be there is some feature of git-annex which would allow me to avoid the dance?