# Re: git-add fails after file type change

- From: Steven Grimm \<hidden\>
- Date: 2016-08-11 19:21:09 
- List: git
- Page: https://ratatoskr.run/git/2016/08/7688201
- Thread: https://ratatoskr.run/git/2016/08/7689743/t.md

```text
Jakub Narebski wrote:
> Works if you use "git mv dir dir.real".
>   

This came up during my testing of snapshot backups. The *real* sequence is more like

$ git checkout -b new-snapshot
$ rsync /live/directory .
$ git add .

In other words, I don't know in advance that there's a rename or (short of turning on verbose rsync output and parsing it) which parts of the tree have changed at all. So I can't easily use git-mv here.

It still feels like a bug that "git add" can fail with no useful diagnostic. It actually took me a fair while to figure out what was going on here -- at first I thought it was having trouble with symlinks in general, then with absolute-path symlinks (which the actual symlink in question is), then I thought maybe it was a corrupt index. It wasn't until I went back and looked at the previous snapshot that I was overlaying this one on top of that I realized there used to be a directory where that symlink lives now.

```