Question

I had a branch dev and a branch cutting-edge.

I had a commit with SHA1 id say 4356xyz on dev. I wanted that to be on cutting-edge. So I checked out cutting-edge and did

git reset --hard 4356xyz

Now when I do git log I see that history of both the branches have become same.
Is there a way by which I can recover the previous history of cutting-edge branch before I did the reset?

Answer 1

git reset --hard 4356xyz took your cutting-edge branch and pointed it at that commit. If that was the same commit that dev was pointing at, then yes, they will share the same history because they are now pointing at the same commit.

You can inspect git reflog to figure out what your branch cutting-edge pointed to before you told get to point it at commit 4356xyz.

In the future, if you want to add commits from one branch onto another, you need to either merge your branches, or cherry-pick specific commits.

To pull just commit 4356xyz, you would git checkout cutting-edge and then git cherry-pick 4356xyz.