I have a (hopefully) fairly common situation but I can't find anything concrete about what's recommended.

I have two Windows machines (both running Windows 11, with git-annex installed). They can talk to each other over SMB.

On each machine, I have a mapped network share pointing to the other machine's annex directory:

Machine 1: D:\ -> \Machine2\annex

Machine 2: E:\ -> \Machine1\annex

Machine 1 is the "primary" in that it has all of the data available. Machine 2 is transient and may not necessarily have a copy of all the data.

On machine 2, I set it up like this (cloning from machine 1):

git clone E:\

On machine 1, I added D:\ (pointing to machine 2) as a remote.

This works, but I wonder if there's a better way given the constraints I have:

• I tried to get ssh working, it was a mess. One machine is AzureAD enrolled, while the other is not which means authentication did not work well at all. I tried to get a third-party SSH server running (Bitvise) with a local account or a "virtual" account, but never quite got there.

• I cannot run WSL. Well, I can. But I'd prefer not to because it's an obstruction/extra hurdle for some things I'm doing.

How do others accomplish this?