[petertodd]

> so e.g. to move away from git-annex you can just commit the binary files directly to your git directory and then just copy them out to a separate folder whenever you go back to an old commit and re-import them.

Exactly. Here's an (anonymized) example of a git-annex symlink from one of my repos:

    ../../.git/annex/objects/AA/BB/SHA256-s123456--abcdf...1234/SHA256-s8968192--abcdf...1234

It's just a link to a file with a SHA256 hash in the name and path. The simplest way to reconstruct that in the future is to just check-in the whole `objects` directory into the repo, and copy/symlink it back to `.git/annex` when needed. You definitely don't need the git-annex software itself to view the data in the future.

I personally have hundreds of gigabytes of data in git-annex repos. It works great!