Hide but still save a branch with GIT?

Question

I have a large number of branches which is getting a bit confusing to work with. Sometimes I dont want to delete the branch completely but I wont be working on it for a while. Ive adopted a convention of prefixing branches with _ when that is the case.

So if i start out with:

branch1
branch2
branch3

When Im done with branch1 but want to save a backup of it just incase then ill rename to:

_branch1
branch2
branch3

This worked well for a while but my workspace is getting a bit cluttered now. Is there anyway of saving a branch somewhere so it can be recovered, but so that its not in the normal workspace (as if its been deleted)?

Answer 1

You can use tags for many of the same sorts of things as branches:

git tag saved_branch1 branch1
git branch -D branch1

And, to recover the branch:

git branch branch1 saved_branch1
git checkout branch1

The catch is that tags can accidentally get pushed upstream, so you have to be careful to avoid that:

git push --tags         ;# Don't do this!
git push --follow-tags  ;# This will only push annotated tags on some commits

Since the tag command I showed above does not create annotated tags (it creates lightweight tags) those will not be pushed.