i think it would be useful to have a fourth kind of [[special_remotes]] that connects to a dumb storage using sftp or rsync. this can be emulated by using sshfs, but that means lots of round-trips through the system and is limited to platforms where sshfs is available. typical use cases are backups to storate shared between a group of people where each user only has limited access (sftp or rsync), when using [[special_remotes/bup]] is not an option. an alternative to implementing yet another special remote would be to have some kind of plugin system by which external programs can provide an interface to key-value stores (i'd implement the sftp backend myself, but haven't learned haskell yet). > Ask and ye [[shall receive|special_remotes/rsync]]. > > Sometimes I almost think that a generic configurable special remote that > just uses configured shell commands would be useful.. But there's really > no comparison with sitting down and writing code tuned to work with > a given transport like rsync, when it comes to reliability and taking > advantage of its abilities (like resuming). --[[Joey]] >> big thanks, and bonus points for identical formats, so converting from >> directory to rsync is just a matter of changing ``type`` from ``directory`` >> to ``rsync`` in ``.git-annex/remote.log`` and replacing the directory info >> with ``annex-rsyncurl = :`` in ``.git/config``. --[[chrysn]]