Pinning¶

How can we control what files are stored locally and which should be retrieved from the network? You can do this by pinning each file or directory you want to keep locally. Normally, files that are not pinned may be cleaned up from time to time, that means they are evaded from the local cache and need to be fetched again from the network when being accessed again. Since you still have the metadata for this file, you won’t notice the difference beside some possible network lag. When you pin a file however, it will not be garbage collected and stays in your local cache until unpinned.

brig knows of two types of pins: Explicit and implicit.

• Implicit pins: This kind of pin is created automatically by brig and cannot be created by the user. In the command line output it is always shows as blue pin. Implicit pins are created by brig whenever you create a new file, or update the contents of a file. Implicit pins are managed by brig and as you will see later, it might decide to save you some space by unpinning old versions.
• Explicit pins: This kind of pin is created by the user explicitly (hence the name) and is never done by brig automatically. It has the same effect as an implicit pin, but cannot be removed again by brig, unless explicitly unpinned by the user. This is a good way of telling brig to never unpin this specific version. Use this with care, since it is easy to forget about explicit pins.

When syncing with somebody, all files retrieved by them are by default not pinned. If you want to keep them for longer, make sure to pin them explicitly.

$ brig pin repin