[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""comment 7"""
 date="2016-01-29T18:20:06Z"
 content="""
As someone else ran into a similar case of this, let me explain a little
bit more..

`git-annex unused` finds files that are not used by the currently checked
out branch, or any other branch or tag. This includes remote branches.

This is an important safeguard, because there might be a clone of the
repository that intentionally still has that file checked out, and it
wouldn't be good for `git-annex unused` to treat such a file as unused.

But if there's an old remote, that's perhaps not getting updated any longer
and has a branch that points to a file, `git annex unused` won't find that file
as unused.

So, one solution is to use `git remote rm` to delete the old remote. Or,
otherwise get git to delete the old remote branch that is keeping the file
around.

The other solution is to run something like `git annex unused
--used-refspec=+master` What this does is only considers the local master
branch as used, and not any other branch or tags. I'd recommend only using
this with caution.
"""]]
