Question

I had to recover a few git bare repositories from a backup, and found out that git (I am using msysgit on wondows XP) did not recognise the repo as such. After some investigation, I found the problem seems to be that the folder “refs” was missing, together with the subfolders “heads” and “remotes”. I also do not have the file “heads/master”. Is there any way I can re-create it? I really need to recover the data in these folders.

Answer 1

Of course, if you have any checkouts of these repos, the easiest thing to do is to just recover from those.

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refs just contains files with the SHA1 of commits that those names point to; refs/heads/master is probably all you need, containing just the SHA1 of the commit for HEAD. You didn’t lose any data (that’s all in objects), but it might be a bit tricky to find out the SHA1 of the commits you want.

If you have the file logs/HEAD, the ref should be in there at the bottom (the first SHA1 being the parent of the most recent commit and the second being the id of it; there might be more if it’s a merge commit, not sure). For example, here’s the last line of one of my repos:

4b2ef6873c3f4c7eaebca06fee4b95ffa9cf58c3 feb84419b6685b920f8a3d61a77e9508ba5dcfe1 Dougal Sutherland <[e-mail]> 1342838724 -0400 pull: Fast-forward

so the hash starting with feb84419b6 is the one I’d want. Unfortunately, I think these are only in non-bare checkouts.

If you don’t have those logs, the commits are all in the objects directory. It’s somewhat likely to be a recently modified one, which you can get on Unix for example by ls -1t */* | head -10 from the objects directory; you can try a couple and see what happens. If you get from this, say

04/718652eb1f03bb0594cc05665665b749b52a87

then remove the / to get the hash you want to use:

04718652eb1f03bb0594cc05665665b749b52a87