There is no tracking information for the current branch

I have a git repository I use for all related work. I cloned it for two reasons: A backup. Allow testing whether everything needed is under version control.

This seems like something that should be easy. If I cannot do it, I might have to give up on version control, as git seems to have conquered the world.

To be clear, by "cloned", I mean that I made it with git clone. I want to maintain the clone as a more or less exact copy of its mother. The clone, of course, would remember its mother.

From git help fetch and git help pull , I gathered I could do this. Nyet. No combination of git fetch and git pull seems to do the trick. Eventually I got [hennebry@fedora sqrt-g]$ git pull \There is no tracking information for the current branch. Please specify which branch you want to merge with. See git-pull(1) for details.

     git pull <remote> <branch>

If you wish to set tracking information for this branch you can do so with:

     git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/<branch> master

[hennebry@fedora sqrt-g]$ gvim /tmp/git.txt
[hennebry@fedora sqrt-g]$ pwd
/home/hennebry/sqrt-g
[hennebry@fedora sqrt-g]$ git branch
   corrections
* master
   split1
[hennebry@fedora sqrt-g]$

I am not happy. What happened? How do I do what I want to do? Will I have to process each branch one at a time? That could be difficult, since at the moment, I cannot even process one branch. git fetch --all ?

The mother is on an SD card that through USB has been continuously connected to my PC at all times. The clone is on my hard drive.

[hennebry@fedora sqrt-g]$ git remote -v origin /run/media/hennebry/data2/mathprog/sqrt-g (fetch) origin /run/media/hennebry/data2/mathprog/sqrt-g (push) [hennebry@fedora sqrt-g]$ [hennebry@fedora sqrt-g]$ git diff [hennebry@fedora sqrt-g]$ git merge fatal: No remote for the current branch. [hennebry@fedora sqrt-g]$