Hello,
I'm very excited about Git Annex and Git Annex Assistant.
One big issue that I have is that I currently have all of my photos (70-80GB) on a HTPC because it has a large hard drive. I have a decent laptop/screen set-up where I would prefer to manage the photos, but the hard drive in there is a small SSD.
I use Shotwell to manage my photos (currently on the HTPC). I would be happy to keep things simple and only access them on the laptop. I have 100GB of box.com storage (and another 100GB of Mega.co.nz storage, but I don't think that is supported by GAA yet).
Ideally, what I would like is for a cache of, say, 10GB of my recently-accessed photos to live on my laptop, with the remaining 70GB living on both my HTPC and box.com. If I ever needed the underlying files for non-cached files (say if I was trying to view full-quality versions of them or send them to someone), it could try to pull these from my HTPC over the local network or, if I was "on the road", box.com. As I understand it, Shotwell has its own database and a set of thumbnails etc that you can use to manage and browse your photos while very rarely accessing the underlying photos.
Is this possible with the existing GAA/Shotwell, or does one or the other require changes? Could I solve the problem by using something like the sharebox Git-Annex FUSE filesystem, so that Shotwell thinks that the files are local, but runs away and grabs them if they are remote?
I would appreciate any thoughts that anyone has - particularly if anyone has made this work.
Mega can be used via megaannex. I don't have personal experience with it, but if you set up a repository manually using that, the assistant can use that repository just as it uses any other repository.
git-annex at the command line is great for small local repositories that pull files from various larger remotes as needed. You just run "git annex get" when you want a file and "git annex drop" when you want to free disk space. You can also use this mode with the assistant, by configuring the local repository to be in "manual mode".
By default though, the way the assistant handles this kind of use case is with
archivedirectories. It tries to move any files in an archive directory away from your local disk, and it tries to get any files not in an archive directory to be locally available. So you can just move files around between directories to control where they are stored. See archival walkthrough for details an an example video.