Cullen King

I just recovered from a scary situation in which I lost a whole commit to git by accidentally working out of the “no branch” branch in git. I would have only lost around 2 hours of work, however, two hours is a decent amount when you are already pressed for time! After about three minutes of googling I came across a link which saved me. The gist of it is below:

  kingcu@kingcu-desktop:~/ridewithgps$ git reflog show

  b709fac... HEAD@{3}: pull origin new_garmin_sync: Merge made by recursive.
  b6e1616... HEAD@{4}: commit: intermediate checkin for Cam. UI is wired up to send to server, now just needs some massaging for generating extra info for a trip like associated route, etc

The commit that was not in any branch is the ‘intermediate checkin’ commit. Now that we have a part of the SHA hash, we can use git log to show the commit, get the full hash and then merge it into the branch we want:

  kingcu@kingcu-desktop:~/ridewithgps$ git log b6e1616
  .....
  .....
  kingcu@kingcu-desktop:~/ridewithgps$ git merge b6e16166608b5be148b5dc0a721af3e8d15de282

Here is the blog which helped me arrive at this solution:

http://techblog.ironfroggy.com/2007/12/how-to-recover-lost-git-branches.html