Re: Git-LFS or Git Annex?

[pukkamustard <pukkamustard@posteo.net>]

Hi!

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

[..]

> From a quick look (I haven’t used them), Git-LFS seems to assume a
> rather centralized model where there’s an LFS server sitting next to the
> Git server¹.  Git Annex looks more decentralized, allowing you to have
> several “remotes”, to check the status of each one, to sync them, etc.²
> Because of this, Git Annex seems to be a better fit.

I agree that Git Annex seems to be a better fit for the reasons you
list.

> What’s your experience?  What would you suggest?

I've used Git Annex for managing many large files (~100s of GiBs) and it
worked. However, I found Git Annex to be quite complex and to do things
automatically without me fully realizing.

The use case was to use Git Annex to distribute large test vectors. This
involved many Git checkouts and worktrees on quite a few different hosts
- some of them ephermal. When running `git annex sync` Git Annex tries
to synchronize the current view of the state to all Git remotes (which
file is available where) with a lot of git pushing and pulling. It ended
up sharing remotes that are no longer existant or not-accessible and
somehow it was hard/impossible to remove reference to those remotes
(afaiu Git Annex remotes can only be marked as "dead" and not removed -
https://git-annex.branchable.com/git-annex-dead/). As the number of such
remotes increased, I became more and more confused.

But this is maybe a special use-case which is not relevant for video
sharing as you describe and probably reflects my inability to understand
how Git Annex works more than anything else.

Still, I would recommend to NOT store the videos in a remote Git
repository but a publicly accessible rsync server as a Git Annex special
remote (https://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/).

Cheers,
pukkamustard