Aborted old git rebase and lost commits since the rebase started

Question

Crap! About a week ago, I was rebasing some commits while trying to clean up my repository, and apparently I didn\'t actually finish it. Today, a week and several commits later,

Answer 1

Check git reflog. You can walk back in time using those commit hashes as a reference in almost all cases.

I'd also physically copy the git repo directory elsewhere as a place to do preliminary testing to see what will work, that way you can mess with whatever you want without losing untracked files or getting things into a state that you can't come back from.

Answer 2

You should be able to get the SHA1 of your most recent commits (that disappeared after the rebase --abort) with a git reflog.

You will be able then to reset your current branch to those SHA1

# Suppose the old commit was HEAD@{2} in the ref log
git reset --hard HEAD@{2}

It is a bit like "Undoing a git reset --hard HEAD~1".

See also the "illustrated guide to recovering lost commits with Git", for other examples of recovery.