Sparkleshare and dvcs-autosync are tools to automatically commit your changes to git and keep them in sync with other repositories. Unlike git-annex, they don't store the file content on the side, but directly in the git repository. Great for small files, less good for big files. Here's how to use the [[git-annex assistant|/assistant]] to do the same thing, but even better! ---- First, get git-annex version 4.20130329 or newer. ---- Let's suppose you're delveloping a video game, written in C. You have source code, and some large game assets. You want to ensure the source code is stored in git -- that's what git's for! And you want to store the game assets in the git annex -- to avod bloating your git repos with possibly enormous files, but still version control them. All you need to do is configure git-annex to treat your C files as small files. And treat any file larger than, say, 100kb as a large file that is stored in the annex. git config annex.largefiles "largerthan=100kb and not (include=*.c or include=*.h)" Now if you run `git annex add`, it will only add the large files to the annex. You can `git add` the small files directly to git. Better, if you run `git annex assistant`, it will *automatically* add the large files to the annex, and store the small files in git. It'll notice every time you modify a file, and immediately commit it, too. And sync it out to other repositories you configure using `git annex webapp`. ---- It's also possible to disable the use of the annex entirely, and just have the assistant *always* put every file into git, no matter its size: git config annex.largefiles "exclude=*"