Reverting to a specific commit without losing history

Question

I know this type of a question has a lot duplicates, but I wanted to open a new one because I didn\'t found in all of the other questions the explaination of the best way to do

Answer 1

The easiest thing to do, like you say, would be to simply create a new branch where HEAD is and then revert development to the commit you want to resume work from:

git checkout development   # Make HEAD point to the 'development' branch
git branch beforeRevert    # Create a new branch reference pointing to HEAD
git reset --hard c14809fa  # Move HEAD, the index and your working copy to c14809fa

Here's a graphical representation of what will happen:

    Step 1               Step 2                  Step 3

            develop    develop, beforeRevert   develop   beforeRevert
           /                    /             /         /
A-B-C-D-E-F          A-B-C-D-E-F             A-B-C-D-E-F
          ^                    ^             ^
         HEAD                 HEAD          HEAD

The important thing here is that HEAD is always pointing to the development branch, so that's the branch that gets moved when you run git reset --hard c14809fa. The new beforeRevert branch will still point to where HEAD was before the revert.