Can anyone give me an example of their usage of git-annex? The project looks interesting, but the most immediate usage I see would be to add big files (e.g. a database dump, PDF documentation, etc.) to a git repository. What else do people use it for?
I use it to manage my "archive" folder, which contains large binary files which rarely change. This includes music, some tv series, operating system .iso images, backups of retired computers, etc..
The great thing about git annex is that each clone of the repository has the entire tree structure of the repository, but by default has none of the data. So if I'm going on a trip I can just cd into the right folder on my laptop and type "git annex get ." or "git annex get Windows*.iso". Being able to tab-complete all the files in the annex even though you don't have a copy of most of them makes it very convenient.
The numcopies constraints also help enforce redundancy on the data. I could use raid to have local redundancy, but that only protects against a harddisk crashing. If I have four repositories in different physical locations and set numcopies to three, then git annex helps make sure there are always enough copies of a file (in three different physical locations), so I won't lose data even if my house burns down.
