In short: is it safe to rsync .git/annex/objects/ to other clones? I'm in the process of migrating a lot of my files to a new backend. Most them still use the old non-file-size-tracking SHA1 backend from when WORM was the default. I have multiple clones that each use about 460 GB of their 500 GB drives. I've noticed that git-annex creates hardlinks to migrated content in .git/annex/objects, so I'm able to migrate all content despite only having 40 GB of free space. Excellent. Now I'm planning to `rsync -a --hard-links .git/annex/objects/ ${CLONE}/.git/annex/objects/` to recreate the hardlinks and save space on the clones as well. If I `fsck` afterwards, this should be fine, right? I've tried this with a test repository and it works but I'd like to be extra sure that I'm not missing something crucial. The alternatives that I'm aware of are: * making space first: `git annex dropunused "1-20000"` and `git annex get .` * running `git annex migrate` in each clone. I expect rsync to be safer and faster than these alternatives.