In Git, how can I recover a staged file that was reverted prior to committing?
I was attempting to pull a change into my repository using Git Tower. When I did so, there was a conflict and I mistakenly hit stage all (as I wanted to commit after resolving the conflict). When I did so, the conflict marked itself as resolved.
I wanted to manually resolve the change so I hit "Abort Merge", however, when I did this, It rolled back all my changes! Is there any way to get them back?
Answer
If you had anything staged to git, you probably should be able to get that back. (If you just changed working copy, you wouldn't be able to restore it.)
First of all: do not run git gc. Backup your repository and working copy before going ahead. (Make sure to backup .git directory.) Also avoid closing terminal where this happened, and/or rebooting — if all fails, you have a chance to find stuff in history / memory.
Anyway, first thing to try is:
git fsck --lost-found
It will print something like
Checking object directories: 100% (256/256), done. Checking objects: 100% (30165/30165), done. dangling blob 8f72c7d79f964b8279da93ca8c05bd685e892756 dangling commit 4993502a6394491190d3f4d6fb3d1e14019c2e9b
Since you lost staged files and did not do a commit, you're interested in dangling blob entries.
Run git show <sha> for each one — some of them should be your files.