Re: Recovering from epic fail (deleted .git/objects/pack)

From: R. Tyler Ballance <tyler@slide.com>
Date: Dec 10, 2008, 10:06 UTC
Message-ID: <1228903606.4445.53.camel@starfruit.local>
In-Reply-To: <7vd4g051ax.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Tue, 2008-12-09 at 16:19 -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> I do not know about "feasible" and "properly", but ...
> 
>  (0) take backup of the repository of this unfortunate developer.
> 
>  (1) make a fresh clone of the central repository that this unfortunate
>      developer's work started out from.
> 
>  (2) copy the contents of the .git/objects/pack/ of that clone to the
>      developer's .git/objects/pack/.

This approach "sort of" worked, i.e. it worked insofar that I was able to use the repository enough to generate a series of patch files for the developer's work from the last two weeks to be applied to their new clone of the central repository. Why I did this is answered below ;)

> 
> See if "fsck --full" complains after that.  If the repository was not
> repacked during that period, all objects created by the activity by the
> unfortunate developer would be loose, so ...

tyler@ccnet:~/source/slide/brian_main> time git fsck --full Segmentation fault

real 27m2.187s user 10m3.238s sys 0m16.609s tyler@ccnet:~/source/slide/brian_main>

Oh well, your approach worked *enough* to get the important data out, and that's what's most important.

Moving forward we're likely going to implement an automated process of walking through developers' repositories and pushing any unpushed refs to a backup repository just to make sure something like this doesn't happen again.

Appreciate the help :)

Cheers

-- 
-R. Tyler Ballance
Slide, Inc.