Notice that in the [[previous example|getting_file_content]], you had to
git fetch and merge from laptop first. This lets git-annex know what has
changed in laptop, and so it knows about the files present there and can
get them.

If you have a lot of repositories to keep in sync, manually fetching and 
merging from them can become tedious. To automate it there is a handy
sync command, which also even commits your changes for you.

	# cd /media/usb/annex
	# git annex sync
	commit
	nothing to commit (working directory clean)
	ok
	pull laptop
	ok
	push laptop
	ok

After you run sync, the repository will be updated with all changes made to
its remotes, and any changes in the repository will be pushed out to its
remotes, where a sync will get them. This is especially useful when using
git in a distributed fashion, without a 
[[central bare repository|tips/centralized_git_repository_tutorial]]. See
[[sync]] for details.