If you're the type of person who types git push -f origin master, please don't do that as it might overwrite your entire branch. I'm saying this because I did this once and I thought I lost all the files.
Luckily, I was a bit relieved as git is a VCS (Version Control Software), which means the files are most likely not deleted. This is when I came across git reflog command.
According to the Git manual, this is what it does:
Reference logs, or "reflogs", record when the tips of branches and other references were updated in the local repository.
This is a life-saver especially if you wanted to return back to the previous point in time. Here's how I recovered my files back again:
- Type
git reflog show remotes/origin/master - Find and make note of the previous commit hash.
- Create a new branch with using the previous commit hash like this:
git branch <new_branch_name> <previous_commit_hash> - Then finally, push the files to the new branch:
git add . && git commit -m "pushing recovered files" && git push origin <new_branch_name> - Checkout to the newly created branch:
git checkout <new_branch_name> - Delete the corrupted branch and replace it with the newly created branch that contains your restored files.
If I didn't discover this, I don't really know what I would have done to recover those files.
References
Hope this helps you out!