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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Dec 10, 2008, 00:19 UTC
Message-ID: <7vd4g051ax.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <1228867861.14165.19.camel@starfruit.local>

"R. Tyler Ballance" <tyler@slide.com> writes:

Show 18 quoted lines

> I really wish I didn't have to ask this question, as we discussed in
> #git early this morning, whiskey is the likely answer.
>
> For unexplainable reasons one of our sysadmins got trigger-happy when he
> tried to prune a temp_pack file generated and left in a
> developer's .git/ directory after a git operation aborted (disk quota
> exceeded)
>
> As a result, the sysadmin killed the developers
> entire .git/objects/pack/ directory. (insert copious amounts of whiskey
> here)
>
> He did not however delete all the other contents of .git/objects (00/,
> 01/, etc)
>
> Is there a feasible way that I can properly recover
> the .git/objects/pack directory such that the developer who had their
> last two weeks of local work thrashed can get it back?

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/.

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 ...