Lost work doing a git checkout, how can I get it back

Question

So... not sure how it happened, but I had been working in a branch a I made a couple changes, ran git add -A and then git commit (with a comment). Did that a few times, and then when I went to push up all the changes to the branch I was in, I got a message that said that the branch was already up to date. I couldnt figure out what the heck was going on, so I checked back out the branch and it overwrote everything.

Stranger still, now all the commits I made are gone when I run git log.

Any way I can get it all back? Or am I SOL and have to figure out why the heck it kicked me out of my branch for some reason?

Answer 1

You are in a detached HEAD (see " Why did my Git repo enter a detached HEAD state? ").
You can confirm it with a git status .

Simply start by making a branch where you are:

git branch tmp

See here one way to fix it (and keeping your commits) , if you want to push aBranch :

git checkout aBranch
git merge tmp

aBranch should now include the commits you did, and you should be able to push it.