Perhaps stupidly I added some very large bare git repos into a git-annex. This took a very long time, used lot's of memory, and then crashed. I didn't catch the error (which is annoying) - sorry about that. IIRC it is the same error if one Ctrl-c's the addition. I ran `git annex add .` a second time and eventually killed it (I perhaps should have waited - I now think it was working). A `git annex unannex` fixed up some files but somehow I managed to end up with tonnes of files all sym-linked into the git annex object directory but not somehow recognised as annexed files. I'm assuming that they somehow didn't make it into git annex's meta-data layer (or equivalent). Commands such as `git annex {fsck,whereis,unannex} weirdfile` immediately returned without error. I've now spent a lot of manual time copying the files back. Doing the following, not the cleverest but I was a little panicky about my data... find . -type l -exec mv \{} \{}.link \; #Move link names out of the way find . -type l -exec cp \{} \{}.cp \; #Copy follows links so we can copy target back to link location find . -type f -name "*.link.cp" | xargs -n 1 rename 's/\.link\.cp//' #Change to original name find . -type l -exec rm \{} \; #Ditch the links git annex unused git annex dropunused `seq 9228` 9228 files were found to be unused, this gives an idea of the scale of the number of "lost" files for want of a better term. A pretty poor bug report as these things go. Anyone any idea what might have happened (it didn't seem space or memory related)? Or how I might have fixed it a little more cleverly? For reference I am using stable Debian, git annex version 3.20111011.