Recovering Deleted Files with the Command Line Git provides ways to recover a deleted file at any point in this life cycle of changes. If you have not staged the deletion yet, simply run `git restore <filename>` and the file will be restored from the index.
You can't access to previous version of untracked deleted files from git, because, of coruse, they do not exist.
Everything you can do with a file, you can do with a folder too.
Also note Find and restore a deleted file in a Git repository
If you have not yet indexed (git add
) your changes you can revert content of a directory:
git checkout -- path/to/folder
If the deletion is already indexed, you should reset that first:
git reset -- path/to/folder
git checkout -- path/to/folder
git reset --hard HEAD
Find the last commit that affected the given path. As the file isn't in the HEAD commit, this commit must have deleted it.
git rev-list -n 1 HEAD -- <file_path>
Then checkout the version at the commit before, using the caret (^
) symbol:
git checkout <deleting_commit>^ -- <file_path>
git reset --hard <revision>
You can restore files or folder with git restore.
git restore --source master~1 "PATH_IN_YOUR_REPO"
Here, master~1 reverts your folder to "1" revision back from your master branch.
Source: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-restore
If you have not yet commited your changes you can revert content or a directory:
git checkout -- removed_directory
If you want to revert all changes do:
git reset --hard HEAD
The only thing that worked for me was to checkout the repo in another folder. Assume the current repo is in /home/me/current
.
I then did
git clone /home/me/current /home/me/temp
This make a separate clone of the repo in /home/me/temp
I can now go to /home/me/temp
and do whatever I want. For example
git reset --hard commit-hash-before-delete
Now I can copy the deleted file folder back
cp -r /home/me/temp/some/deleted/folder /home/me/current/some/deleted/folder
And delete the temp folder
rm -rf /home/me/temp
The examples of
git checkout -- some/deleted/folder
git checkout -- some/deleted/folder/*
DO NOT WORK
$ git checkout -- some/deleted/folder/*
zsh: no matches found: some/deleted/folder/*
$ git checkout -- some/deleted/folder
error: pathspec 'some/deleted/folder' did not match any file(s) known to git.
Other examples like
git reset --hard HEAD
are destructive beyond just the deleted files. Any other changes will also be lost.
Similarly
git reset --hard some-commit
will lose any commits after some-commit
As of git 2.24.0, there's an experimental new git command: git restore
git restore --staged some/deleted/folder
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