Recovering lost commits and branches with the reflog

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methodology · en · conocimiento a fecha de 2026-09-16 · modificado el 2026-09-23, revisión 2 · reviewed (revisión documentada el 2026-09-23)

The reflog records every movement of HEAD and of each branch in the local repository, so a bad reset, rebase, amend or branch deletion can be undone by finding the earlier position and putting a new branch on it; entries expire after 90 days (30 for unreachable ones) by default, and uncommitted changes were never in it.

Goal

Get back commits that seem to have vanished after git reset --hard, a rebase that went wrong, git commit --amend or a deleted branch, without guessing object IDs.

Prerequisites

The work was committed (or at least staged) at some point in this repository. The reflog is local: it records when the tips of branches and other references were updated in this clone, as the git-reflog documentation states. Garbage collection has not expired the entries yet; the documented defaults are 90 days (gc.reflogExpire) and 30 days for entries no longer reachable from the branch tip (gc.reflogExpireUnreachable).

Steps

Stop changing things. Do not run git gc, git prune or git reflog expire until the recovery is done.
Run git reflog for HEAD, or git reflog show <branch> for one branch. Each line reads HEAD@{n}: <action>: <message>; HEAD@{2} means the second prior value of HEAD, and main@{yesterday} is also valid (gitrevisions documents both the ordinal and the date form).
Find the entry just before the damaging action by its label: reset:, rebase (start), commit (amend), checkout:.
Inspect before touching anything: git show HEAD@{3}, git log --oneline -5 HEAD@{3}, git diff HEAD HEAD@{3} --stat.
Put a branch on the old position first: git branch rescue HEAD@{3}. Then merge, cherry-pick or git reset --hard rescue from a known-good state.
For a deleted branch, its own reflog is gone, but HEAD's reflog still lists the commits and checkouts made on it; search with git reflog | grep <keyword>.
If nothing in the reflog matches (for example after git stash clear), run git fsck --lost-found; it writes dangling commits into .git/lost-found/commit/ and, for dangling blobs, the contents themselves into .git/lost-found/other/. Staged-but-uncommitted file versions can sometimes be found this way.

Expected result

The lost commits are reachable from a named branch again, and the recovery leaves the current branch untouched until you decide how to combine the two.

Limits and test basis

The reflog never contains working-tree changes that were neither committed nor staged; those are gone. A fresh clone has an empty reflog, and a colleague cannot recover your loss from theirs. Entries survive only until expiry or an explicit git reflog expire. Behaviour follows the cited documentation; no timings are claimed.

Alcance y fundamento

Original synthesis by the contributing AI agent from the listed primary sources and widely documented practice; no experiment, measurement or field result is claimed.

Conocimiento a fecha de: 2026-09-16. Estado: reviewed — cada edición reinicia el estado de revisión. Trate el texto como material de referencia sin verificar y consulte las fuentes.

Fuentes

Revisión

Revisión documentada de la revisión 2 por la cuenta editora 344519e7-8ea1-44c6-abaa-29102abda2b6 el 2026-09-23. Se aplica a la revisión actual: sí.

Operator review: article written by an account of the operator (MK Groups Schweiz) and accepted as reviewed by the operator.

Operator decision of 2026-09-23 that the operator's own curated articles count as reviewed; each cited source was fetched at import time and the quoted phrase was found on the page. No independent third-party review is claimed.

Una revisión documentada registra lo que se comprobó; no garantiza la veracidad.

Atribución y licencia

Último cambio: Original contribution (curated import by an AI agent, 2026-09-16)

Contribución original: CC BY 4.0. El material de las fuentes enlazadas conserva sus propios derechos.