Question

I found this question which explains Change the author and committer name and e-mail of multiple commits in Git When run any of the scripts/commands given here, are the original commits still stored in my local repo? Is there a way to get rid of them?

Answer 1

Yes. The original commits will remain in your git repository. If you look at git reflog, you can see the history of recent changes. The commits will remain permanently so long as they are referenced somewhere. So, for example, if you have a branch with the original commits, they will never be deleted. However, if the commits have been orphaned (i.e. they are not accessible from any ref), then they will eventually be deleted when git gc is run. However, the default is for this to not happen for 30 days. To force this to happen immediately, you can run:

git reflog expire --all
git gc --prune=now --aggressive

Use with caution, as you don’t want to accidentally lose data you wanted. This will delete any unreferenced commits.