Can I recover a branch after its deletion in Git?

Question

If I run git branch -d XYZ, is there a way to recover the branch? Is there a way to go back as if I didn't run the delete branch command?

Answer 1

A related issue: I came to this page after searching for "how to know what are deleted branches".

While deleting many old branches, felt I mistakenly deleted one of the newer branches, but didn't know the name to recover it.

To know what branches are deleted recently, do the below:

If you go to your Git URL, which will look something like this:

https://your-website-name/orgs/your-org-name/dashboard

Then you can see the feed, of what is deleted, by whom, in the recent past.

Answer 2

Most of the time unreachable commits are in the reflog. So, the first thing to try is to look at the reflog using the command git reflog (which display the reflog for HEAD).

Perhaps something easier if the commit was part of a specific branch still existing is to use the command git reflog name-of-my-branch. It works also with a remote, for example if you forced push.

---

If your commits are not in your reflog (perhaps because deleted by a 3rd party tool that don't write in the reflog), I successfully recovered a branch by reseting my branch to the sha of the commit found using a command like that (it creates a file with all the dangling commits):

git fsck --full --no-reflogs --unreachable --lost-found | grep commit | cut -d\  -f3 | xargs -n 1 git log -n 1 --pretty=oneline > .git/lost-found.txt

---

If you should use it more than one time (or want to save it somewhere), you could also create an alias with that command...

git config --global alias.rescue '!git fsck --full --no-reflogs --unreachable --lost-found | grep commit | cut -d\  -f3 | xargs -n 1 git log -n 1 --pretty=oneline > .git/lost-found.txt'

and use it with git rescue

To investigate found commits, you could display each commit using some commands to look into them.

To display the commit metadata (author, creation date and commit message):

git cat-file -p 48540dfa438ad8e442b18e57a5a255c0ecad0560

To see also the diffs:

git log -p 48540dfa438ad8e442b18e57a5a255c0ecad0560

Once you found your commit, then create a branch on this commit with:

git branch commit_rescued 48540dfa438ad8e442b18e57a5a255c0ecad0560

Answer 3

I used the following commands to find and retrieve my deleted branch. The first steps are from gcb's description.

$ git fsck --full --no-reflogs --unreachable --lost-found > lost
$ cat lost | cut -d\  -f3 > commits
$ cat commits | xargs -n 1 git log -n 1 --pretty=oneline

Now look for the git commit id (GIT-SHA) based on the commit comments and use it in the command below. Checkout a new branch called NEW-BRANCH with the previously found GIT-SHA:

$ git checkout -b NEW-BRANCH GIT-SHA

Answer 4

For recovering a deleted branch, First go through the reflog history,

git reflog -n 60

Where n refers to the last n commits. Then find the proper head and create a branch with that head.

git branch testbranch HEAD@{30}

Answer 5

BIG YES

if you are using GIT follow these simple steps https://confluence.atlassian.com/bbkb/how-to-restore-a-deleted-branch-765757540.html

if you are using smartgit and already push that branch go to origin, find that branch and right click then checkout

Answer 6

If you like to use a GUI, you can perform the entire operation with gitk.

gitk --reflog

This will allow you to see the branch's commit history as if the branch hadn't been deleted. Now simply right click on the most recent commit to the branch and select the menu option Create new branch.