Question

I tend to be a bit paranoid about my data, including the ability to recover it.

Git reflog data is pruned after 30 days. Is there a way of setting it so that the reflog data is maintained and kept indefinitely?

Any major advantage or disadvantage (other than space or speed considerations) to doing so?

Answer 1

Caveat: reflogs are local and are not sent/received with push/pull operations.

Cons: reflogs may result in (otherwise) unreachable snapshots (and consequently blobs) being kept around, growing your repo to larger sizes than might be desirable. Look at gc.reflogexpireunreachable for something that may help in this respect.

Two configuration settings govern the expiration of reflog entries:

gc.reflogexpire, gc.<pattern>.reflogexpire

git reflog expire removes reflog entries older than this time; defaults to 90 days. With “<pattern>” (e.g. “refs/stash”) in the middle the setting applies only to the
refs that match the .

gc.reflogexpireunreachable, gc.<ref>.reflogexpireunreachable

git reflog expire removes reflog entries older than this time and are not reachable from the current tip; defaults to 30 days. With “<pattern>” (e.g. “refs/stash”) in the
middle, the setting applies only to the refs that match the <pattern>.