Use case: Main machine, portable drive, backup machine

Hello everybody, I need some setup advice.

I want to set up a portability and data security (in the sense of redundancy) scenario for a user with some, but not exulting, tech skills. A directory that contains progressing work should be synced with incoming data and backed up.

Locations

Main machine (laptop), containing all software to process data and write result files
USB thumb drive, will occassionally receive additional data at the faculty (no root access/possibility to install annex or even git there)
Offline file server (ssh/sftp through wired lan), backing up all data

Goals

The laptop and USB drive should stay in sync in both directions; processed work must appear on the USB, data copied onto the USB must appear on the main machine (copies of files, not links).
All data should be backed up on the file server.
The user should not be required to stage/commit files from the command line, this should be handled automatically (annex assistant?)

Questions

This sounds a bit like the "nomad" scenario described, but not totally like it. Is git annex the proper tool for the job?
How do I set that scenario up? Especially, who is a remote of what and why, and how do I make sure I got a copy of every file in every location without doing it all manually?

At the moment this is all done with a number of grsync sessions. It works, but if anything is done in the wrong order, current data is overwritten by older one (this could be resolved using git, but would require manual staging/commiting, what we want to avoid).

Can you help me on that?

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One more requirement

Oh, I forgot: data must be writable at least on the main machine, possibly on the thumb drive, too.

Comment by - — Tue Aug 2 06:58:04 2016

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comment 2

Use git-annex repositories on both the laptop and the thumb drive.

You can start by setting up the repository on the thumb drive, and then git clone it to the laptop.

Use git annex direct to make them use direct mode, so that files can be edited.

You can run the git-annex assistant in the repository on the laptop (~/annex is the usual place for such a repository). This way changes to files there will automatically be committed to git.

There's not currently a good way to have the assistant also commit any files that were added to the thumb drive, or merge in changes from the laptop to the thumb drive. Running the assistant in the repository on the thumb drive would take care of both, but fails when the thumb drive gets unplugged.

What you can do is write a simple shell script to sync up the thumb drive. Something like this:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
cd /media/thumbdrive
git annex add
git annex sync -m "syncing thumb drive"

Comment by joey — Wed Sep 21 19:59:25 2016

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