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Experience with Recovering From User Error (And suggestions for improvements)

From
Armin Ronacher <armin.ronacher@active-4.com>
Date
Feb 16, 2015, 10:41 UTC
Message-ID
<54E1C96D.2080109@active-4.com>
Hi,

Long story short: I failed big time yesterday with accidentally executing git reset hard in the wrong terminal window but managed to recover my changes from the staging area by manually examining blobs touched recently.

After that however I figured I might want to add a precaution for myself that would have helped there. git fsck is quite nice, but unfortunately it does not help if you do not have a commit. So I figured it might be nice to create a dangling backup commit before a reset which would have helped me. Unfortunately there is currently no good way to hook into git reset.

Things I noticed in the process:
*   for recovering blobs, going through the objects itself was more
     useful because they were all recent changes and as such I could
     order by timestamp.  git fsck will not provide any timestamps
     (which generally makes sense, but made it quite useless for me)
*   Recovering from blobs is painful, it would be nice if git reset
     --hard made a dangling dummy commit before :)
*   There is no pre-commit hook which could be used to implement the
     previous suggestion.

Would it make sense to introduce a `pre-commit` hook for this sort of thing or even create a dummy commit by default? I did a quick googling around and it looks like I was not the first person who made this mistake. Github's windows client even creates dangling backup commits in what appears to be fixed time intervals.

I understand that ultimately this was a user error on my part, but it seems like a small change that could save a lot of frustration.

Regards, Armin

Next: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
Message 1 of 11 in “Experience with Recovering From User Error (And suggestions for improvements)”
  1. Armin RonacherFeb 16, 2015
  2. Ævar Arnfjörð BjarmasonFeb 16, 2015
  3. Ævar Arnfjörð BjarmasonFeb 16, 2015
  4. Duy NguyenFeb 16, 2015
  5. Armin RonacherFeb 16, 2015
  6. Michael J GruberFeb 18, 2015
  7. Michael J GruberFeb 19, 2015
  8. stash: introduce checkpoint modeMichael J Gruber, Feb 19, 2015
  9. Kyle J. McKayFeb 19, 2015
  10. Junio C HamanoFeb 19, 2015
  11. Kyle J. McKayFeb 19, 2015

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