How to Revert Public Git Repo to Specific Previous Commit?

Question

I want to revert a public repo I recently cloned back to a previous version of itself from a year ago. I don't want to do a hard revert.

I have already tried this:

cd MyRepo
git revert --no-commit dc3b4359.. 

But I got this error:

error: could not revert dc3b4359...
hint: after resolving the conflicts, mark the corrected paths
hint: with 'git add <paths>' or 'git rm <paths>'

I am a novice at this; what code could be used to do this safely? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

(EDITED) (thanks @torek)

The most crude way would be:

cd MyRepo
git rm -r .
git checkout dc3b4359 -- .
git add .
git commit -m "Going back in time"
git push origin master

Original answer:

cd MyRepo
rm -rf * # if you have files starting with '.', delete them too.
git checkout dc3b4359 -- .
git add .
git commit -m "Going back in time"