Recovering Lost Work

Part of the Git course

At some point you will type a command, press Enter, watch the terminal print something calm and final, and realise you have just deleted a day's work. Everyone does it. The good news, and it is the single most reassuring fact in all of Git: if you committed it, it is almost certainly still there. Git does not throw commits away when a branch stops pointing at them.

There is one important limit, and it is worth stating before anything else. This safety net only catches work that was committed at some point, meaning saved into a snapshot with git commit. Changes that were only ever sitting in your editor, never staged and never committed, are not in Git's storage at all, so a git restore that wipes them really does wipe them.