[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""comment 1"""
 date="2017-10-25T19:13:16Z"
 content="""
The strance output you pasted shows git-annex checking the *local*
repository to see if it has a copy of the file. As far as I can see, that
has nothing to do with any failure to get the file from a remote
repository. 

> Clone that to a remote server. Unfortunately I don't remember the exact commands - I think that was done with the rsync special backend.

Are you talking about a git-annex rsync special remote,
or a git repository accessed via a rsync:// url, or what?

> /home/yaroslav/work.git/d0d/994/SHA256E-s81068--de1d8de99645d74ba1ea186b6cabd1fc116cb6c1823130756f33ff81807815ed.pdf/SHA256E-s81068--de1d8de99645d74ba1ea186b6cabd1fc116cb6c1823130756f33ff81807815ed.pdf

What this path tells me is that, despite this being a bare git repository,
the content of objects is not in work.git/annex/objects/ where it belongs,
but at the top of the repository.

Hypothesis: You created this bare git repository. But then rather than
simply having git-annex send contents of files to it in the sane and
regular way, you them proceeded to set up some kind of special remote,
in the same directory. It could have been a rsync special remote, or
a directory special remote. You copied the files to that special remote.

Then, you deleted the original git repository, which was the only one that
knew about the special remote, before syncing it to anywhere.

That fits all the evidence. I don't think that's a mistake many people
are likely to make.

It should be possible to recover from this situation by:

	cd /home/yaroslav/work.git/
	mkdir -p annex/objects
	mv d0d annex/objects
	# also move any other 3 letter directories that have annex
	# objects in them
	git annex fsck

Then after `git annex sync` in your clone, it should know where the content
is and be able to get it from the bare repo.

Assuming that works, I'm having a hard time treating this as any kind
of bug in git-annex. You put the gun in a vise, bent its barrel
to a 180 degree angle, and... ;)
"""]]