If I have an archive with a lot of big files, is it possible to get one of them without using the command line, and without it popping up on other clients of that repository? Is it possible to have a folder that will not be synced with other clients but will still download the file when i copy it from archive? .gitignore probably wont work because that will not get the file from archive.
Sorry I took so long to answer. I think that it took me a few tries to understand your question.
You want to have a special folder on a single clone of a repository, and be able to move files to that folder from the archive folder, and have it get the file content from the archive repository. But you don't want that file content to spread to any of the other repositories.
This is possible to do by writing a custom preferred content expression, and configuring the repository to use it. For simplicity, let's make the folder be called
archive/local. This way, all the clients that do not use this preferred content expression will see that the file is still under the archive folder, and not want its content.Now we can take the preferred content expression used by client repositories normally:
((exclude=/archive/ and exclude=archive/*) or (not (copies=archive:1 or copies=smallarchive:1))) or (not copies=semitrusted+:1)
And modify it:
((exclude=/archive/ and exclude=archive/ and (not /archive/local/) and (not archive/local/)) or (not (copies=archive:1 or copies=smallarchive:1))) or (not copies=semitrusted+:1)
You can use
git annex vifgto edit the preferred content expressions, and paste that in. Should work. Untested.