[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="http://joeyh.name/"
 ip="209.250.56.87"
 subject="comment 1"
 date="2013-12-12T17:20:27Z"
 content="""
The assistant currently only considers transferring files to other remotes that are currently in the tree, not old versions of files, or files no longer in the tree. You can send everything, manually, by running `git annex copy --all --to backupremote`

When you're using direct mode, git-annex does not try ensure that every historical version of a file is preserved. Because in direct mode there is only one copy of a file, and you can edit or delete it at any time. If preserving every version is important to you, don't use direct mode; indirect mode will handle this nicely. (Of course you can still force it to remove files in indirect mode.)

I think it would make sense for the assistant to sometimes try to send everything to some remotes. The tricky part is probably working out which remotes it makes sense to send that to. Currenty, [[preferred_content]] expressions only indicate whether files currently in the tree are wanted. They would need to be expanded somehow, so that full backup repositories could indicate they also want every available past version of a file.
"""]]