I have a bunch of files I want to track with git-annex that are sitting in an external drive. I have a repository sitting on my laptop, but I don't actually have enough free disk space on my laptop to import the files. Really, I just want the file content to be sitting in a special remote. I was thinking the following workflow could be useful:

cd ~/my-laptop-repo
git-annex import --to=s3-remote /mnt/usb-drive/myfiles

The proposed --to=remote option would add the files to my repo as import normally does, but it wouldn't every keep the content in the repo, the only copy would now sit in s3-remote. As little disk space as possible would be staged temporarily in ~/my-laptop-repo. Perhaps the easiest option would be to import a file normally, but them immediately do a move to s3-remote? But, ideally for larger files, we would want to stream them directly from /mnt/usb-drive/myfiles to s3-remote without ever staging them at ~/my-laptop-repo.

done --Joey