恢复分支上未提交的更改

Question

I start to work on some changes on my master branch and realize that this is not a quick fix and I will need more time to do my fix. So I save my work in a different branch as described here with:

git checkout -b newClientID

I didn't commit my change there, since I wanted to make more relevant progress. Then I switch to my master and reset it

git checkout master
git checkout -- .

When I switch back to my branch newClientID I realize that my uncommitted changes have been lost. Any chance to recover them?

Answer 1

If you don't commit and reset the working tree, it's lost forever.

Next time, commit often, maybe more than necessary and eventually squash commits with interactive rebasing before pushing to remote.

By commiting, eg with git commit -m wip , I find it less error prone than git stash because it's all too easy to git stash pop in the wrong branch.

Answer 2

The same happened to me. this is a silly answer but it actually worked. I went to my files with the lost changes, ctrl+z and all the changes appeared.