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* unannex, uninit: Avoid committing after every file is unannexed, for massive speedup. * --notify-finish switch will cause desktop notifications after each file upload/download/drop completes (using the dbus Desktop Notifications Specification) * --notify-start switch will show desktop notifications when each file upload/download starts. * webapp: Automatically install Nautilus integration scripts to get and drop files. * tahoe: Pass -d parameter before subcommand; putting it after the subcommand no longer works with tahoe-lafs version 1.10. (Thanks, Alberto Berti) * forget --drop-dead: Avoid removing the dead remote from the trust.log, so that if git remotes for it still exist anywhere, git annex info will still know it's dead and not show it. * git-annex-shell: Make configlist automatically initialize a remote git repository, as long as a git-annex branch has been pushed to it, to simplify setup of remote git repositories, including via gitolite. * add --include-dotfiles: New option, perhaps useful for backups. * Version 5.20140227 broke creation of glacier repositories, not including the datacenter and vault in their configuration. This bug is fixed, but glacier repositories set up with the broken version of git-annex need to have the datacenter and vault set in order to be usable. This can be done using git annex enableremote to add the missing settings. For details, see http://git-annex.branchable.com/bugs/problems_with_glacier/ * Added required content configuration. * assistant: Improve ssh authorized keys line generated in local pairing or for a remote ssh server to set environment variables in an alternative way that works with the non-POSIX fish shell, as well as POSIX shells. # imported from the archive
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[[!meta title="what git-annex is not"]]
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* git-annex is not a backup system. It may be a useful component of an
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[[archival|use_case/bob]] system, or a way to deliver files to a backup
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system. For a backup system that uses git and that git-annex supports
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storing data in, see [[special_remotes/bup]].
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* git-annex is not a filesystem or DropBox clone. However, the git-annex
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[[assistant]] is addressing some of the same needs in its own unique ways.
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(There is also a FUSE filesystem built on top of git-annex, called
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[ShareBox](https://github.com/chmduquesne/sharebox-fs).)
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* git-annex is not unison, but if you're finding unison's checksumming
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too slow, or its strict mirroring of everything to both places too
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limiting, then git-annex could be a useful alternative.
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* git-annex is more than just a workaround for git scalability
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limitations that might eventually be fixed by efforts like
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[git-bigfiles](http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/git-bigfiles). In particular,
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git-annex's [[location_tracking]] allows having many repositories
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with a partial set of files, that are copied around as desired.
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* git-annex is not some flaky script that was quickly thrown together.
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I wrote it in Haskell because I wanted it to be solid and to compile
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down to a binary. And it has a fairly extensive test suite. (Don't be
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fooled by "make test" only showing a few dozen test cases; each test
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involves checking dozens to hundreds of assertions.)
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* git-annex is not [git-media](https://github.com/schacon/git-media),
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although they both approach the same problem from a similar direction.
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I only learned of git-media after writing git-annex, but I probably
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would have still written git-annex instead of using it. Currently,
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git-media has the advantage of using git smudge filters rather than
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git-annex's pile of symlinks, and it may be a tighter fit for certain
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situations. It lacks git-annex's support for widely distributed storage,
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using only a single backend data store. It also does not support
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partial checkouts of file contents, like git-annex does.
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* git-annex is similarly not [git-fat](https://github.com/jedbrown/git-fat),
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which also uses git smudge filters, and also lacks git-annex' widely
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distributed storage and partial checkouts.
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* git-annex is also not [boar](http://code.google.com/p/boar/),
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although it shares many of its goals and characteristics. Boar implements
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its own version control system, rather than simply embracing and
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extending git. And while boar supports distributed clones of a repository,
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it does not support keeping different files in different clones of the
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same repository, which git-annex does, and is an important feature for
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large-scale archiving.
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* git-annex is not the [Mercurial largefiles extension](http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/LargefilesExtension).
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Although mercurial and git have some of the same problems around large
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files, and both try to solve them in similar ways (standin files using
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mostly hashes of the real content).
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