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datalad

Retrieve, version, and publish scientific datasets with DataLad and git-annex, and capture computational provenance with datalad run, rerun, and containers-run. Use when cloning or fetching data from OpenNeuro, DANDI, datasets.datalad.org, or any DataLad dataset; when a file in a dataset reads as a broken symlink or a small pointer instead of real data; when an analysis needs a machine-readable record of how each output was produced so it can be re-executed; or when publishing a dataset to siblings such as a GitHub repository plus a storage remote. Also use to decide between DataLad and plain Git for a data-carrying repository.

backend/cli/skills/data-engineering/datalad/SKILL.md

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# DataLad

## Overview

DataLad is a data management layer over Git and git-annex. Git tracks the dataset
structure, small text files, and the history. git-annex tracks the *content* of large
files, storing each file as a key and keeping the bytes somewhere that is not necessarily
the local repository.

That split is the single most important thing to internalise, because it means a freshly
cloned dataset contains the full history and the full file listing while containing almost
none of the data. A 100 TB dataset clones in seconds and occupies a few megabytes. The
bytes arrive only when asked for, per file, with `datalad get`.