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Newbie needs some help undoing a mess!

I was tring to push my site to a git repository, so I used the git add command. Then, before I did the commit, I realized I had added everything from my root folder instead of just the directory I wanted. Since I didn't want to do that commit, I used the git rm --chached command to remove everything, thinking I was only changing what would be pushed to git. I also used git clean.

Now, I realize those commands actually deleted the files on my site! What have I done? If anyone can help me put things back in place, I would really appreciate it. -JB

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    is there a previous commit you can revert to? if so, try git reset --soft origin/master Commented Jun 8, 2013 at 15:19
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    If you initilize a git repo, then add files, then remove them from the index with git rm --cached and then clean up with git clean, everything will be gone since at that point all your files are unknown to git, and it will remove them. (read the man page of git-clean) Commented Jun 8, 2013 at 15:33
  • Also, even though the file contents could probably be retrieved from the blobs (with e.g. git fsck --lost-found), I'm fairly sure the directory structure is gone. Commented Jun 8, 2013 at 15:44

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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If you already deleted all files in your workspace. You can get it back by using the following command.

git checkout -f

The files should be back!

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5 Comments

This assumes that the changes were never actually committed. It sounds to me like they were committed, but it is a bit unclear.
no, there was no commit, but it is also saying the branch is unborn.
@Dabellator branch is unborn sounds like you haven't done git fetch
Basically what it sounds like is that i used git clean to remove untracked files, and because of that they aren't coming back. Correct?
@Dabellator if you did git add then git rm --cached and then git clean on the same new files, with no commit in between, then they are hard to recover using Git. Maybe with git fsck --lost-found
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You can do

git reset --hard HEAD^

To move one step back in the version history, effectively undoing the last commit including all deletes.

If you have already pushed your changes you can instead do

git revert HEAD

To create a new commit reverting the delete commit, and then push that.

This answer assumes that you did commit the changes, and that was the last commit you did. If you didn't commit the changes, Willy's answer is better.

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have you tried git reset --hard (commit # before this horrible accident)?

then use git pull origin master to extract files from the online git repo to get your files back.

A more in depth explanation of this process is located on this SO thread.

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