Question

I just made a new repository on github. Starting with a folder full of files, the steps I did were:

git init
git add -A
git remote add origin ...

#Now pull in the first commit that github made
git pull origin master

#Check everything is OK
ls

Eek! All my files have disappeared! What happened? Can I get them back?

Answer 1

You can get them back. Even though the only thing pointing to it was the index, git add still put the added content in the repo. I’d start with a git fsck to find “dangling” (git’s slightly quirky spelling of “unreferenced”) blobs and git cat-file -p those blobs, if there’s too many I’d do something like find .git/objects -type f | xargs ls -lt.