DEV Community

Recover a lost Git stash in two steps

Mehdi M. on April 27, 2018

Sometimes you end up stashing code, then at some point those stashes get cleaned. And one day, you may encounter the situation I faced this week: ...

Read full post

htps • Feb 4

Saved my day ❤️

johnwait • Jan 15 '20

On Windows, in a good old command window (your usual cmd.exe), step 1. could be translated to:

for /f "tokens=3" %a in ('git fsck --unreachable ^| find "commit"') do @git log --merges --no-walk %a

If your Git speaks français, and you're one to choose the more complicated path, you could use something like:

for /f "tokens=1,2,3,4" %a in ('git fsck --unreachable ^| find "commit"') do @if "%c"=="inatteignable" (@git log --merges --no-walk %d) else (@git log --merges --no-walk %c)

or, really, keep it simple with alias git='LANG=en_GB git' instead.

Bonus

For PowerShell aficionados, here's a command that should work regardless of your Git's locale (well, as long as a commit is still referred to as commit):

(git fsck --unreachable | Select-String "commit") -split '\s+' | Select-String -pattern "^[0-9a-fA-F]{40}$" | ForEach-Object { git log --merges --no-walk $_ }

(Really useful post btw!)

neel-magicedtech • May 3 '22

This command for windows saved my life and job. Thankyou so much!!

Mehdi M. • Jan 15 '20

Thanks! A link to your comment has been added to the article.

studog-github • Jul 17 '19

This almost worked for me. I found that the update-ref command created the stash ref correctly but git stash list still did not show anything.

I added the --create-reflog parameter on a second try, and then things worked.

git version 2.22.0 on Ubuntu 18.04

Mehdi M. • Aug 29 '19

Thanks! I don’t have this issue in Git 2.20.1 (macOS 10.14.16) but added a note in the article.

AMANI Eric • Nov 24 '20

Thanks a lot. This saved me .

Samar Hussain • Apr 23 '22

Mehdi bro you have no idea how big of a trouble you saved me from. I accidentally stashed and cleared hard work of my several days and night (My mistake I shouldn't have piled up that big). And your post just saved my life. I was almost crying. Thanks a lot dude. God bless you.

Mehdi M. • Apr 25 '22

Hey Samar, you know what? I feel there's a lot of gratitude in your message, so I want to say thank you for having taken the time to put it down. It sincerely made my day better (and today is not the easiest one for me 😅).

I hope everything's fine with your work, now. Sharing is caring. ✌️

Mathieu Schopfer • Aug 26 '19

This may fail if you don't use git in English. To quickly fix it:
alias git='LANG=en_GB git'

Mehdi M. • Aug 28 '19

What is different when you use Git in another language? I didn't know it existed.

Mathieu Schopfer • Aug 28 '19

In French (I cannot tell for other languages), commit seems to have been translated by objet commit.

git fsck --unreachable returns
objet commit inatteignable 977ee79082f2e1179c3d2156f8f0e6c66682ea2d
instead of
unreachable commit 977ee79082f2e1179c3d2156f8f0e6c66682ea2d

Thus, cut -d ' ' -f3 returns inatteignable instead of the commit tag.

Mehdi M. • Aug 29 '19

Ha oui, carrément. :D

Gonna update the article. Thanks a lot!

Randy Strauss • Jan 27 '20 • Edited

I tried both commands (git 2.21.1):
git update-ref refs/stash b68ecd901f90158d7c41edf2d2d3868e3599ca29 -m "My recovered stash"
git update-ref refs/stash b68ecd901f90158d7c41edf2d2d3868e3599ca29 --create-reflog -m "My recovered stash"

both give usage (below, removing the '-d' and '-stdin' stuff:
usage: git update-ref [] []
-m reason of the update
--no-deref update not the one it points to
-z stdin has NUL-terminated arguments
--create-reflog create a reflog

Is refs/stash the refname? Or is the sha the refname?
What's the "new-val" and "old-val" - values of what?

This page seems to help:
gist.github.com/joseluisq/7f0f1402...

git log --graph --oneline --decorate ( git fsck --no-reflog | awk '/dangling commit/ {print $3}' )
and then
git stash apply YOUR_WIP_COMMIT_HASH

Thanks for the hope, and being a stepping stone to most of what I needed. :?)

(4 of my files weren't stashed, though. It turns out NASA's backup utility has been silently failing for months, so I've lost a few days work. Under-staffed projects are a pain. Luckily, the project and my attitude don't really matter...)