I have around 70 GBs of data spread around 4 repositories on a Linux (Ubuntu) box. My problem is I need to reformat the drive they are on. I would like to move them to an external usb drive temporarily during reinstall then move them back to their original location. When I started with annex I did try to mv annexFolder/ toNewLoc/ which failed leaving behind a corrupt repo. What is a safe way to move an annex folder? My primary connection is a 3G modem so I am trying to avoid re downloading everything. Another thing I am trying to avoid is cloning the repos to the external drive, reinstall, clone it back to the internal drive and mark original and external repos as dead, but AFAIK those dead repos will show up in the output of whereis, so everytime I reformat I gonna have two extra dead repos.
moving the annex should work fine, provided:
git annex whereisdoes not show dead repositories.Anyway Justin is of course right: Provided the assistant is not running in a repository, the repository is just a collection of files in a directory, and can be moved around, tarred up, untarred, etc just like any other repository. If the assistant is running it may become unhappy if its repository vanishes out from underneath it.