恢复删除的git分支你不知道名字

Question

So a colleague has asked me (as team trainee GitHub manager) if it's possible to recover a branch he created months ago, and recently deleted but can't remember the name of. Our working tree is as follows:

1. master branch (Main production version)
2. Staging branch (Testing before release to master)
3. Development branch (Main development branch where all future branches are created from
4. Personal branches (our induvidual branches that we make changes on, created from Development and then merged back into Development when complete)

The branch in question was created from Development, but it was never merged back in as it got old and work priorities pushed it back. Now there's time to work on it again we were wondering if it's possible to retrieve some kind of history that we can use to help us remember the branch name so we can then recover it...if at all possible...

Any advice would be appreciated! Have googled but most answers are based on branches that have been merged back in.

Answer 1

You can use git reflog to check where the HEAD was point.

There may has the information like checkout: moving from develop to personal_branch , and the commit was the personal_branch where HEAD point to.

If the log history is cleaned in .git/logs unfortunately, you can use git fsck --full instead.

Answer 2

Per Marina - MSFT's answer, best case would be to find help in the reflog of the repo that originally created the branch (since it has the best chance of having relevant reflog entries).

But if that doesn't help, plan B would be to locate the dangling commits. Again this has the best chance of success in the repo that once housed the branch assuming it was deleted recently. (Once the commits became unreachable, it becomes possible that gc will remove the commits entirely, and then the jig is up.) One way to look for them would be

git fsck --unreachable --verbose

and check the output for something like

unreachable commit c0d3abcd...

You'll probably see several if you see any; you can use

git cat-file -p c0d3abcd

to see what each one is. If you find one that represents the state you want to work from, put a branch on it. (The original branch name will basically be unrecoverable at this point.)

If the local repo has lost the objects to a gc , you could try the remote. It probably won't send the unreachable objects on a clone or pull request (though it's possible that it will depending on server implementation, you can't count on it), but it may provide API's for checking its reflogs or unreachable objects.