Does EGit “Revert Commit” permanently delete the original commit?

Question

I'm still learning Git's workflow for doing things, and realized that I was accidentally in the wrong working branch when I committed some files. So using EGit, I listed the commit history and selected Revert Commit from the context menu for a couple of commits.

I have since realized that I wanted those commits, but cannot find the original commits anywhere. It seems as though the original commits were all but deleted. Even doing a full log listing on the entire git repo does not show the original commit or the revert commits.

From my understanding of the EGit docs, revert commit was just supposed to "undo" the changes by creating a new commit ontop of the old one, undoing what it had done. However, it would appear that it actually deleted my original commits.

Am I toast? Did I permanently lose those changes? I'm running Eclipse 3.7 with EGit 2.1.0.20120919.

Answer 1

git revert , as you said, doesn't delete the commits. It only creates a new commit undoing the changes of a certain commit passed to it. So, the original commit is still in the repository. Listing the commits with git log should show the original commit and the commit that undo what the original commit does.

With that, to recover the original content of the commit, you can revert the revert commit or change your repository status to the commit before the revert with git reset --hard hash where hash represents the hash of the commit before the commits that represents your git revert .

Answer 2

Your best bet is to leave eclipse and egit for a while and use the commandline.

There is a tool called git reflog that can show you much more than git log . I suggest you give that a try to see what you have done to the repository.