I have a large USB hard disk where I store all my projects and a computer with a rather small SSD. The SSD holds only projects that are active, they are my "working copy". Whenever I connect the USB drive to the computer, I want it to be updated from the SSD.
What would be the best possible setup for that? Is it possible at all? How would I tag certain projects as active?
Yes, of course. This is a core feature of git-annex ans is done with git-annex-preferred-content.
First step is to let the usb drive want anything with
git annex wanted here anything. Then you need to tell git-annex what files you want on the SSD. There are multiple ways to do that:The simplest one is to set the preferred-content expression on the SSD to something like
include=path/to/project_a or include=path/to/project_b or include=...and so on.Or you can just decide manually what files to keep on the SSD with
git annex get. Then you set the preferred-content expression to justpresent. I think that this should work pretty well with your workflow, since new files will appear first on the SSD and thus are already present.Tags are the most complicated way to do this. You basically set the preferred-content expression to something like
metadata=tag=keeponssd. Then you tag the files you want to keep on the SSD withgit annex metadata --force -t keeponssd path/to/project_a(--force makes it recursive). The disadvantage is that if you add new files, you have to manually tag them too or else they will be dropped with the nextgit annex sync --content --all.To update/sync changes back to the usb drive, you just run
git annex sync --content --all. With --all, it will also copy old versions of files to the usb drive.