Can I restore deleted files (undo a `git clean -fdx`)?

Question

No. Those files are gone.

(Just checked on Linux: git clean calls unlink(), and does not backup up anything beforehand.)

git clean -fdxn

Will do a dry run, and show you what files would be deleted if you ran

git clean -fdx

(of course this is only helpful if you know this ahead of time, but for next time)

IntelliJ/Android Studio allows restoring files from local history.

No. "git clean -fdx" will delete all files and directories that git does not track from your working-directory. Because Git does not track these files, it won't have any backups of these files. At least not usually.

If you have done a 'git add' on one of these files relatively recently (but aborted the commit), there is a chance you can find it with 'git fsck --lost-found'. It's worth a try, but don't get your hopes up too much.

In the future you should consider rather committing a few times too often than a few times too seldom. That way you'll at least have a local backup, even if you don't end up pushing these commits to a remote.

If you are using any Jetbrains IDE there's an option to see local history of a file. In case you have done git clean, you can recreate the file and check the local history of the file and restore it from there.

Worked for me for a single file. For a complete directory I don't have any idea how to do that.

As @kusma mentioned above, if you are lucky (if you ever did "git add"), then you can use the following to extract the entire object:

git fsck | awk '{print $3}' | xargs git show | tee searchresults.log

That way, it will look for all the types of chunks, collect the entire diffs and add to a file that you can extract the lost file. In my case, I had lost an entire Java class.