restore all refs from git bundle

Question

How to restore all remote branches from backup (git bundle).

Backup:

$ git bundle create /tmp/dp --all
$ git bundle list-heads /tmp/dp | head -n5
f37c9fc7f0ce121568f42fb01390b1862c67f308 refs/heads/master
f37c9fc7f0ce121568f42fb01390b1862c67f308 refs/heads/show
9aabc2a4fb18181fee6d0e7e03170a976b6ed49b refs/remotes/origin/NewLayers
aef1fc8a416413ee5b7f4370f255ab654b3407ee refs/remotes/origin/elevator
bc4c78f94a67857fbd7210ecc5ebcd80ec736b1a refs/remotes/origin/elevator_1
$ git bundle verify /tmp/dp | head -n1
/tmp/dp is okay
The bundle contains 65 refs

Restore:

$ git clone /tmp/dp dp
Cloning into dp...
$ cd dp
$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/origin/show

I tried fetching and pulling but it didn't help.

I also tried to clone with "--mirror" to create bare repo and then clone from it, but the result was the same.

Answer 1

The problem is that on cloning the remote branches of the remote repository are not tracked (and the local branches of the remote repo are tracked as remote tracking branches). You didn't say in your question but I guess the (bare) repository created with --mirror included the remote tracking branches.

So the right thing to do is:

git clone --mirror /tmp/dp
mkdir dp
mv dp.git dp/.git
cd dp
git config core.bare false
git reset --hard

(i.e. clone with --mirror and undo the implied --bare.) Not pretty but works. Alternatively create a new empty repo using git-init and define /tmp/dp as remote with a line

fetch = +refs/*:refs/*

instead of the normal

fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/remotename/*

and fetch from it.