So far in this walkthrough, git-annex has been used with a remote repository on a USB drive. But it can also be used with a git remote that is truely remote, a host accessed by ssh. Say you have a desktop on the same network as your laptop and want to clone the laptop's annex to it: # git clone ssh://mylaptop/home/me/annex ~/annex # cd ~/annex # git annex init "my desktop" Now you can get files and they will be transferred (using `rsync` via `ssh`): # git annex get my_cool_big_file get my_cool_big_file (getting UUID for origin...) (from origin...) SHA256-s86050597--6ae2688bc533437766a48aa19f2c06be14d1bab9c70b468af445d4f07b65f41e 100% 2159 2.1KB/s 00:00 ok When you drop files, git-annex will ssh over to the remote and make sure the file's content is still there before removing it locally: # git annex drop my_cool_big_file drop my_cool_big_file (checking origin..) ok Note that normally git-annex prefers to use non-ssh remotes, like a USB drive, before ssh remotes. They are assumed to be faster/cheaper to access, if available. There is a annex-cost setting you can configure in `.git/config` to adjust which repositories it prefers. See [[the_man_page|git-annex]] for details. Also, note that you need full shell access for this to work -- git-annex needs to be able to ssh in and run commands. Or at least, your shell needs to be able to run the [[git-annex-shell]] command.