Recover lost code after stash and checkout

April 3, 2024

I seem to have misplaced (that’s my hope) dozens of hours worth of work. Here is the history of what I did to my Git repo:

I had worked on some code modifications that I wanted to temporarily stash and revert to the previous commit. I had ‘Branch A’ checked out at the time.
git stash
git checkout 44f7b43f355e30e15ab9081c2f8e92188277ca53 (I think this is where I went wrong – this was the previous commit I wanted)
git revert 44f7b43f355e30e15ab9081c2f8e92188277ca53 (Clearly I didn’t know what I was doing)
git checkout 44f7b43f355e30e15ab9081c2f8e92188277ca53
I now had my previous commit code.
git stash apply (I wanted to move back forward with my previous changes)
git stash pop (At this point I assumed I was back to where I wanted to be working on Branch A. I saw all my recent changes present again.)
Dozens of hours worth of work done. What I didn’t realize is that the command prompt still showed this: vscode ➜ /workspaces/git/aws-shared_network-terraform/terraform (7c76f7e) indicating I wasn’t actually in Branch A.
ran a commit in vscode
ran a sync in vscode. I received an error that I needed to checkout a branch first to sync.
I checked out Branch A.
"oh poop" moment because all my work disappeared.
git checkout 44f7b43f355e30e15ab9081c2f8e92188277ca53 (Code was not restored)

I am now sitting at:
vscode ➜ /workspaces/git/aws-shared_network-terraform/terraform (44f7b43) $

Is there a way to recover this?

I found that if I run git log --reflog I see my commit from today:

commit 9746368659f680c934fe97e7c70881ae4882400f
Author: Me
Date:   Wed Apr 3 17:46:13 2024 +0000

    enable cdn redirect and cleanup

I don’t want to do anything else until someone provides direction.

>Solution :

You’re safe since you did commit your changes and they’re in the reflog. The only thing that’s missing is they’re not part of a named branch. To fix that:

Check out Branch A.
Run git cherry-pick 9746368659f680c934fe97e7c70881ae4882400f to add your commit to Branch A.

(Note: It won’t literally add that commit hash to the branch. It will replay the commit on the branch as if you had committed to Branch A originally. You’ll get a new commit with the same contents and commit message but different hash.)