Mastodawn

Julia Evans May 16, 2024

in git, what ways are there to "lose" a commit in a way that you CAN'T recover using the reflog (so that you need to iterate over every single commit in the repository if you want to find it?

The only ways I know (using git's normal tools) are:

* using `git stash drop` or `git stash pop` to drop a stashed commit
* waiting 90+ days to try to recover the commit (so that it expires from the reflog)
* explicitly deleting the reflog in some way (rm -rf .git, git reflog expire, etc)

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Julia Evans May 16, 2024

also: have you even run into a situation where git *completely deleted* a commit that you needed? (where it wasn't recoverable with the reflog or with `git fsck`)

only interested in things that have *actually happened to you*, not "this could theoretically happen if…”

I'm trying to think about whether there's any normal way for that to happen except if you completely delete your git repository.

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Dmitrii Kalianov

@b0rk I've had a case where I had a silent SSD (or was it HDD?) corruption and lost important commits this way. It was a long time ago, so I don't remember if `git fsck` detected or not, but during normal operation it was completely silent about it.