Question

I don’t really know what I’ve just done so I’m just going to give a kind of timeline.

I was trying to set up a gitHub repository today for the first time. I have a folder where I keep all the files from my site and it had a .git folder. Every so often I was committing changes etc and everything seemed ok.

Today I tried to merge two branches of the project I was working on. I tried “merge” and “rebase” commands but I couldn’t really understand what was happening or what I was doing so I decided I’d just start over with git.

I pulled the .git folder out of my website folder (I didn’t delete it which I guess could be my saving grace here). Did a new git Init in the folder and committed the website files to it.

That’s when I noticed loads of files were missing. I think they’re still in the first .git folder. Is there a way I can restore a directory from this folder?

Answer 1

I’m surprised that you’ve been working for two months with git and decided that starting over was that best way to recover from a failed rebase, it should be a lot easier.

You should be able to recover your old commits into the new repository without too many problems.

You can add a new remote that is your old saved repository:

git remote add old /path/to/old/saved/.git

Then you can fetch all of the old history.

git fetch old

Then you can open up a history browser (e.g. gitk --all) to have a look at the old history.

You can check out versions of missing files with a command such as:

git checkout old/master -- path/to/missing/file

The old/master refers to the master branch in your old repository, you can use the id of any branch or commit here, though.