Bring back local changes after a checkout

Question

Is there any way to redo changes in the working directory after checking them out? I just ssh'd into a server I hadn't been on in a while and saw that there were unstaged changes in the index. I assumed that this was just scratch work I had done last time, but figured because I didn't commit them they weren't important and ran:

$ git checkout .

to give myself a clean slate. Unfortunately this was a bit hasty, because it turns out that last time I was on this server I just forgot to commit, and the majority of the work I had done was in those changes.

I feel like this is a long shot, but is there any way to bring back these local changes to the working directory?

Answer 1

Either those changes were:

• staged (meaning added to the index), in which case a git fsck --full --unreachable --no-reflog can help.
  See for instance:

  • "Recover files that were added to the index but then removed by a git reset"
  • "Recovering added file after doing git reset --hard HEAD^"

• not staged (local private modification in the working tree): in which case, those modifications are lost.