The Reflog: Undoing Almost Anything in Git

Git rarely loses commits; it loses your pointer to them. The reflog is the record of everywhere HEAD has been, and it turns most “I destroyed everything” moments into a two-minute fix.

Find where you were#

git reflog

Every line is a position HEAD held, newest first: checkouts, commits, resets, rebases. Find the entry just before the mistake — its message usually names the operation that went wrong.

Go back there#

git reset --hard HEAD@{2}

Or, safer, put a branch on the good position first and look at it before resetting anything:

git branch rescue HEAD@{2}

The classic recoveries#

• git reset --hard one commit too far: the “lost” commit is in the reflog, reset back to it.
• Deleted branch you still needed: git reflog, find the last commit the branch pointed at, git branch the-name <hash>.
• Rebase gone wrong: the reflog holds the branch’s pre-rebase position as HEAD@{n} from before the rebase started.

The limits#

The reflog is local and expires (90 days by default for reachable entries). It saves you from your own commands, not from a disk dying — that is what the remote is for. And uncommitted work that was never staged is genuinely gone; the reflog only tracks commits.

When in doubt, git branch rescue first. A branch you delete after inspecting costs nothing.