I have two machines connected to my home network. machine A. Machine A has a git-annex repo which stores the data using a remote bup repo. The bup repo resides on Machine A itself. Now, I want to set up the same kind of environment in Machine B ( git annex repo backed down by bup remote). The only condition is that I need to re-use the bup repo in the machine A. So I went up like this:

git clone ssh://192.168.1.33/path/to/git-annex-repo-on-machine-a

This succeeded. The next step was to add a reference to the bup repo on machine A to this new git-annex repo in machine B. I went about like this:

git annex initremote mybup type=bup encryption=none buprepo=192.168.1.33:/path/to/bup-repo-on-machine-a

This seems to work OK, except the fact that the following shows up:

Reinitialized existing Git repository in /Users/XXX/.bup/ 
Reinitialized existing Git repository in /Users/path/to/bup-repo-on-machine-a

Q1: Why does git-annex create bup repos on the local folder while initializaing a remote bup repo?

After that, I tried to get the file from the git repo using

git annex get <file>  --from mybup

..And nothing happened. This is the debug output from the last command :

read: git ["--git-dir=/private/tmp/annexed-setups/.git","--work-tree=/private/tmp/annexed-setups","show-ref","git-annex"]
read: git ["--git-dir=/private/tmp/annexed-setups/.git","--work-tree=/private/tmp/annexed-setups","show-ref","--hash","refs/heads/git-annex"]
read: git ["--git-dir=/private/tmp/annexed-setups/.git","--work-tree=/private/tmp/annexed-setups","log","refs/heads/git-   annex..c9af31cb3e563657e83b8b8e1f9a8de1ff690e4f","-n1","--pretty=%H"]
read: git ["--git-dir=/private/tmp/annexed-setups/.git","--work-tree=/private/tmp/annexed-setups","log","refs/heads/git-annex..b7b2af7f94af4770d5b4da7231bc3e41c0a6129d","-n1","--pretty=%H"]
read: git ["--git-dir=/private/tmp/annexed-setups/.git","--work-tree=/private/tmp/annexed-setups","log","refs/heads/git-annex..7b1017c5e68ec5a2b298b899bf723d0093fa0c7c","-n1","--pretty=%H"]
chat: git ["--git-dir=/private/tmp/annexed-setups/.git","--work-tree=/private/tmp/annexed-setups","cat-file","--batch"]
read: git ["--git-dir=/private/tmp/annexed-setups/.git","--work-tree=/private/tmp/annexed-setups","ls-files","--cached","-z","--","file.iso"]

The file was not obtained from the remote. However, when I did

git annex fsck --from mybup

This resolved all the files properly and then when I did a

git annex list. 

it showed all files to be reachable from the mybup repo.

Q2 Is this the correct workflow? Q3 Do I need to do a [costly] fsck for bup remote to properly work over ssh?