Undo a git reset

Posted on July 18, 2011
Tags: ,

I just happened to muck around with a repository and “accidently” reset it to a previous commit. It looked as if I lost all my recent changes. But I found out that you can “undo” the operation, here is how:

Lets say you’ve reset your repository to specific commit in the past: 
$ git reset --hard b0f7f7e600b1add7d27cc6794c68ec332a8eb90e
Now the latest commit is obviously b0f7f7e600b1add7d27cc6794c68ec332a8eb90e and all newer commits seem to be gone. You can figure out the SHA id of your previous HEAD with the reflog: 
$ git reflog
c8b2660 HEAD@{0}: commit (amend): Bla foobar
780cd51 HEAD@{1}: commit: updated HEAD
...
Your previous HEAD should be among those entries in the reflog. Look for the ‘updated HEAD’ commit. In my example it’s HEAD@{1}. Pick the SHA of the commit you think was the previous HEAD and reset the repository again: 
$ git reset --hard 780cd51
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