Question

After manually making branches and copies of my small project, I’m finally trying using git with no experience. How do you import all of these manual copies?

Answer 1

If you feel that it’s worthwhile to import all your old history into Git, it’s possible to do so. However, manually importing history can be pretty tedious, especially with multiple branches. Some people have written scripts to import code in an existing VCS into Git, but obviously that wouldn’t directly work for your manual copies.

I would consider whether you really need all the historical copies in Git. If not, then start using the basic Git operations with your current code and move forward from now.

If you still want to manually import history, here’s how you could do it in a simple manner:

# create a new repository in the current directory
git init

# get snapshot #1 from files1
cp ~/backup/files1/* .
git add .
git commit -m "files1 snapshot"

# get shapshot #2 from files2
cp ~/backup/files2/* .
git add .
git commit -m "files2 snapshot"

# get snapshot in files_test into test_branch
git checkout test_branch
cp ~/backup/files_test/* .
git add .
git commit -m "files_test snapshot on branch test_branch"

If you have removed files between revisions, you’ll also have to use git rm as well as git add to fully record history. Advanced use of the above can let you change the commit date and time from the current time to whatever timestamp you like.