Can git undo a checkout of unstaged files

Question

I accidentially discard my changes on files in my local working tree via git checkout  The files aren t staged at this time  Is it posible to  undo  this checkout

User · Answer

Maybe your changes are not lost  Check  git reflog   I quote the article below    Basically every action you perform inside of Git where data is stored  you can find it inside of the reflog  Git tries really hard not to lose your data  so if for some reason you think it has  chances are you can dig it out using git reflog   See details   http   gitready com intermediate 2009 02 09 reflog-your-safety-net html

User · Answer

If you work with a terminal cmd prompt open  and used any git commands that would have showed the unstaged changes  diff  add -p  checkout -p  etc    and haven t closed the terminal cmd prompt since  you ll find the unstaged changes are still available if you scroll up to where you ran those aforementioned git commands

User · Answer

Unfortunately your changes are lost  Your private modifications are simply overwritten   Unless you did git stash prior making checkout     Take it from the brighter side  you can now implement things even better

User · Answer

Dude   lets say you re a very lucky guy just like I ve been  go back to your editor and do an undo command   Z for mac   you should see your lost content in the file  Hope it helped you  Of course  this will work only for existing files

User · Answer

Technically yes  But only on certain instances  If for example you have the code page up and you hit git checkout  and you realize that you accidently checked out the wrong page or something   Go to the page and click undo   for me  command   z   and it will go back to exactly where you were before you hit the good old git checkout    This will not work if your page has been closed  and then you hit git checkout  It only works if the actual code page is open

User · Answer

An effective savior for this kind of situation is Time Machine  OS X  or a similar time-based backup system  It s saved me a couple of times because I can go back and restore just that one file

User · Answer

Check local history in your IDE

User · Answer

In case you ever stashed the changes earlier  for example  prior to rebasing   this will likely help  How to recover a dropped stash in Git   even if you have already  stash pop ed the changes

User · Answer

If you are using a  professional  IDE chances are good that you can restore files from a local History  In Rubymine for example you can right click files and watch a history of changes independent from the git changes  saved me a few times now

User · Answer

I believe if a file is modified but not yet added  staged   it is purely  quot private quot   Meaning it cannot be restored by GIT if overwritten with the index or the HEAD version  unless you have a copy of your current work somewhere   A  quot private quot  content is one only visible in your current directory  but not registered in any way in Git  Note  As explained in other answers  you can recover your changes if you use an IDE  with local history  or have an open editor  ctrl Z

User · Answer

In VSCODE ctrl z  undo  worked for me  I did git checkout  instead of git add   and all my file changes were lost   But Now using command   z in my mac   recovered the changes and saved a tone of work for me

User · Answer

If you are working in an editor like Sublime Text  and have file in question still open  you can press ctrl z  and it will return to the state it had before git checkout

User · Answer

I normally have all of my work in a dropbox folder  This ensures me that I would have the current folder available outside my local machine and Github  I think it s my other step to guarantee a  version control  other than git  You can follow this in order to revert your file to previous versions of your dropbox files  Hope this helps

User · Answer

Developing on OS X  Using Xcode  You re likely to be in luck  As described in a comment by qungu  OS X maintains an autosaved version history of files  even if you re not using time machine  So  if you ve blown away your unstaged local changes with a careless git checkout    here s how you can probably recover all your work   If somebody finds this thread having destroyed some work in XCode  there is a way to get the AutoSave history  XCode itself does not have a menu entry to see the AutoSave history  but it does store it  If you open the files in question in TextEdit  you can revert and look through the AutoSave history under File  gt  Revert   Which is awesome  and recovered about a day of work for me  yesterday   You might ask   quot Why doesn t the git command-line UI  the premier VCS used for software engineering in 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020  at least back up files before just blowing them away  Like  you know  well written software tools for about the last three decades  quot  Or perhaps you ask   quot Why is this insanely awesome file history feature accessible in TextEdit but not Xcode where I actually need it  quot      and both of those  I think  will tell you quite a lot about our industry  Or maybe you ll go and fix those tools  Which would be super

User · Answer

I just had that happen to me  I checked out an entire folder containing hours of work  Fortunately I found out that my IDE Netbeans keeps an history of each file  that allowed me to recuperate 99  of the stuff even though I needed to fix a few things manually

[git] Can git undo a checkout of unstaged files

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