How to add a local repo and treat it as a remote repo

Question

I'm trying to make a local repo act as a remote with the name bak for another local repo on my PC, using the following:

git remote add /home/sas/dev/apps/smx/repo/bak/ontologybackend/.git bak

which gives this error:

fatal: '/home/sas/dev/apps/smx/repo/bak/ontologybackend/.git' is not a valid remote name

I'm trying to sync two local repos, with one configured as a remote named bak for the other, and then issuing git pull bak.

What is the best way to do it?

---

Edit:

Sorry, silly me, I've just realized the remote add should be:

git remote add bak /home/sas/dev/apps/smx/repo/bak/ontologybackend/.git

the name of the remote goes before the address.

Answer 1

You have your arguments to the remote add command reversed:

git remote add <NAME> <PATH>

So:

git remote add bak /home/sas/dev/apps/smx/repo/bak/ontologybackend/.git

See git remote --help for more information.

Answer 2

If your goal is to keep a local copy of the repository for easy backup or for sticking onto an external drive or sharing via cloud storage (Dropbox, etc) you may want to use a bare repository. This allows you to create a copy of the repository without a working directory, optimized for sharing.

For example:

$ git init --bare ~/repos/myproject.git
$ cd /path/to/existing/repo
$ git remote add origin ~/repos/myproject.git
$ git push origin master

Similarly you can clone as if this were a remote repo:

$ git clone ~/repos/myproject.git

Answer 3

It appears that your format is incorrect:

If you want to share a locally created repository, or you want to take contributions from someone elses repository - if you want to interact in any way with a new repository, it's generally easiest to add it as a remote. You do that by running git remote add [alias] [url]. That adds [url] under a local remote named [alias].

#example
$ git remote
$ git remote add github git@github.com:schacon/hw.git
$ git remote -v

http://gitref.org/remotes/#remote