Question

How can I move my work and changes from the master branch to a newly created branch and leave the master branch intact after the move?

Answer 1

You can create a new branch pointing to the current commit using git branch branchname (or git checkout -b branchname if you want to check it out directly). This will basically duplicate your master branch, so you can continue working on there.

If you have successfully copied the branch, you can reset master to its original point by using git reset --hard commit where commit is the hash of the commit that should be the last one on master.

So for example you have a situation like this:

---- 1 ---- 2 ---- 3 ---- 4 ---- 5 ---- 6
                   ^                    ^
              original                master
            master commit

So you have checked out master on commit 6, and you want to create a new branch ticket pointing to that 6 while resetting master to 3:

git branch ticket
git reset --hard 3
git checkout ticket

And then you’re on ticket pointing to commit 6, while master points to 3.