Local Files Turn Into Unusable 66KB Aliases After datalad push on macOS

[GLManenti]

What is the problem?

Hi everyone,

I'm encountering a serious issue with datalad that began occurring consistently since yesterday. Here's the workflow I routinely follow:

1. Update from origin: datalad update -s origin --how merge
2. Commit local changes: datalad save -m "message"
3. Push offline changes: datalad push --to origin

After step 3, I find that all of my local (pushed) files are replaced by 66KB alias files, which are unusable (they seem like broken links or incomplete annex pointers). This never happened before (working daily on this project since February), but now it happens every time I push.

To recover, I've been running:

git annex get .

But even that is behaving inconsistently — sometimes requiring a full branch reset like:

git reset --hard d3b7.....

I'm on macOS, and I wonder if this is platform-specific or something recently changed in datalad/git-annex. Has anyone experienced this? Any ideas on how to fix or avoid this behavior?

Thanks in advance!

What steps will reproduce the problem?

No response

DataLad information

No response

Additional context

No response

Have you had any success using DataLad before?

No response

[mlell]

Hi, I am not from the Datalad team, but maybe there is something I can help ... I think a bit more info is required.

• Can you show the content of one of the files? Try to open them with a text editor.
• Can you show what branch you are on (git branch), to see if you are on an adjusted branch?
• What is the output of git config --get core.symlinks?
• Are your files saved in unlocked state? You can find out for example by `git ls-tree HEAD:(some path with annexed files)