How To Recover Lost Git Branches

Daniel, at work, ran into a problem of accidentally removing a branch he had just created and made a commit to, thus loosing the days work. This was actually the fault of our internal scripts to manage the branching and merging policy we've set up. By "internal" I mean that I wrote them and it was my fault his whole day of work was gone, so that left it up to me to figure out how to repair the situation and salvage the current commit back from the ether. I thought it might be good to document, in the case that anyone else needs to do this.

This works in the case of branch A existing and branch B being removed after a single commit on it and branch B being from A. This means we know commit A and we need to find an unnamed commit, what was B, to recover it.

I can demonstrate the recovery process with a simple transcript.

ironfroggy:/tmp ironfroggy$ mkdir A
ironfroggy:/tmp ironfroggy$ cd A
ironfroggy:/tmp/A ironfroggy$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in .git/
ironfroggy:/tmp/A ironfroggy$ cat >> test
a b c
ironfroggy:/tmp/A ironfroggy$ git add test
ironfroggy:/tmp/A ironfroggy$ echo "commit 1" | git commit -m test
Created initial commit 5b2401e: test
1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 test
ironfroggy:/tmp/A ironfroggy$ cat >> test
1 2 3
ironfroggy:/tmp/A ironfroggy$ git add test
ironfroggy:/tmp/A ironfroggy$ echo "commit 2" | git commit -m test
Created commit 08217dc: test
1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
ironfroggy:/tmp/A ironfroggy$ git reset --hard HEAD^
HEAD is now at 5b2401e... test
ironfroggy:/tmp/A ironfroggy$ git reflog show master
5b2401e... master@{0}: reset --hard HEAD^
08217dc... master@{1}: commit: test
ironfroggy:/tmp/A ironfroggy$ git log master
commit 5b2401e38d400c3039a53a036f2d98f75d544056
Author: Calvin Spealman
Date: Sun Dec 2 13:27:25 2007 -0500

test
ironfroggy:/tmp/A ironfroggy$ git log 08217dc
commit 08217dc6ef8f8117d6c9e4bca6fe7f18f78559b6
Author: Calvin Spealman
Date: Sun Dec 2 13:28:01 2007 -0500

test

commit 5b2401e38d400c3039a53a036f2d98f75d544056
Author: Calvin Spealman
Date: Sun Dec 2 13:27:25 2007 -0500

test
ironfroggy:/tmp/A ironfroggy$ git merge 08217dc6ef8f8117d6c9e4bca6fe7f18f78559b6
Updating 5b2401e..08217dc
Fast forward
test | 1 +
1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
ironfroggy:/tmp/A ironfroggy$ cat test
a b c
1 2 3


The red line is the dangerous move that lost your commit. Now, nothing is actually removed from the repository, except for when you perform a garbage collection, so I knew we could recover this somehow. After a short time looking through the docs and asking a question or two on IRC, I arrived at the solution. There are logs kept on the changes that happen to refs (or branches), so I could use that to see the log of when that commit happened. You can see that and the commit the follows when the reset occurs and undoes our commit. The commit id is in the short version, but if we look at the log of that commit, we get the full ID and can simply merge it back into our branch. A very clean solution, indeed.

For Daniel This Means...

He didn't loose his whole days work, but he should be doing local commits more often so that any problems with our scripts can't show up in the first place. At least the work was recovered, and in short time. He is saved, for one more day at least, from being a disgruntled co-worker.

For Git This Means...

I'd love to contribute, so I'm thinking the git-fsck command needs something that can do this for you. Some operation to locate child commits would be really useful in these situations. Once again, I'm very happy with the move to Git.