Before dropping a file, git-annex wants to be able to look at other remotes, and verify that they still have a file. After all, it could have been dropped from them too. If the remotes are not mounted/available, you'll see something like this. # git annex drop important_file other.iso drop important_file (unsafe) Could only verify the existence of 0 out of 1 necessary copies Unable to access these remotes: usbdrive Try making some of these repositories available: 58d84e8a-d9ae-11df-a1aa-ab9aa8c00826 -- portable USB drive ca20064c-dbb5-11df-b2fe-002170d25c55 -- backup SATA drive (Use --force to override this check, or adjust annex.numcopies.) failed drop other.iso (unsafe) Could only verify the existence of 0 out of 1 necessary copies No other repository is known to contain the file. (Use --force to override this check, or adjust annex.numcopies.) failed Here you might --force it to drop `important_file` if you [[trust]] your backup. But `other.iso` looks to have never been copied to anywhere else, so if it's something you want to hold onto, you'd need to transfer it to some other repository before dropping it.