Reflog & Recovery
📌 Covered in this chapter:
HEAD · git reflog · Recovering Deleted Branches · Dangling Commits
Recover seemingly lost commits and branches using git reflog — Git's local, personal safety net.
1Reflog & Recovery — What You'll Learn
Recover seemingly lost commits and branches using git reflog — Git's local, personal safety net.
Here's everything this chapter covers, in the order you'll learn it:
- Understanding HEAD as a moving pointer
- git reflog — a log of every place HEAD has been
- Recovering commits after a bad git reset
- Recovering an accidentally deleted branch
- Dangling commits (unreferenced but not yet deleted)
- How 'lost' changes are usually still recoverable
- Creating a temporary recovery branch
- An overview of Git's garbage collection
- A safe recovery procedure step by step
- Making backups before any risky operation
2Working Example
💻 Example: Reflog & Recovery
Bash
git reflog
git branch recovery-branch 3Best Practices & Common Pitfalls
💡 Key things to remember:
- reflog is local-only and eventually expires (default ~90 days) — it's a safety net for recent mistakes, not permanent storage, so recover promptly.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q What's the most important thing to understand about reflog & recovery?
Focus on: HEAD · git reflog · Recovering Deleted Branches · Dangling Commits. These are the core building blocks this chapter's examples are built around, and they show up repeatedly in later chapters of this course.
Q Is reflog & recovery something I'll use often in real projects?
Yes — every concept in this chapter reflects a real, everyday part of professional Git and GitHub workflows, not just a theoretical exercise.