I just lost two weeks of work due to git reset --hard HEAD^. Any way to get it back?

Question

I did a commit with a lot of work and accidentally a folder of images which was huge. I then did a git reset --hard HEAD^ and thought it would just remove the commit. But it turned out it also removed all the work I had done ... huge bummer.

Now, I've read hundreds of posts about recovering from that exact accident. But no matter what I try, I simply cannot recover all the edited files and folders I've created during the last days.

HOW, can I make git give me back the lost files?

OK. Obviously clearly overworked here ... what I did was:

git add .

And then after seeing my mistake I did a:

git reset --hard HEAD^

Yes, totally screwing around here.

How do I recover from this situation?

Answer 1

After git fsck --lost-found tells you about all the "dangling blob"s it saved, look in .git/fsck/lost-found/other . There are many files in here, with completely useless names (actually just hash IDs), but with the contents of the files that you had git add -ed that were not already in your repository.

You can either go through the files as they are here, or copy or move them out to a temporary area elsewhere. You must look at each file, figure out what name it should have or whether you want to keep it at all, and if so, give it a better name.

The original file names are not saved anywhere in Git (they were in your index, but git reset --hard overwrote that index with the current index). (They would have been saved beneath a commit, had you made a commit.)