Undo an accidental hg strip?

Question

I have accidentally run hg strip, and deleted a stack of commits. I have not done anything in the repo since. Is there a way for me to bring back this stack of commits, to undo the hg strip I just ran?

Answer 1

As long as you didn't run the strip with the --no-backup option, the stripped changesets can be found in the repository under .hg\strip-backup. If you sort the directory content by date the latest one is likely the one you need to restore. Restore it with hg unbundle <filename>.

Answer 2

It is possible to hg pull from a strip backup file as an alternative to using hg unbundle.

As noted in a comment on another answer to this question, hg unbundle has fewer options and only works with bundles, but can unbundle more than one bundle at a time. Whereas hg pull can pull from a single source (share/web/bundle) and has other options.

Here's an example of using hg pull based on an external post by Isaac Jurado:

Usually the backup is placed in REPO/.hg/strip-backup/. See the example below:

 $ hg glog
 @  changeset:   2:d9f98bd00d5b tip
 |               three
 o  changeset:   1:e1634a4bde50
 |               two
 o  changeset:   0:eb14457d75fa
                 one
 $ hg strip 1
 1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved

 saved backup bundle to
 /Users/hchapman/ttt/.hg/strip-backup/e1634a4bde50-backup.hg

And then, what one would do to recover those changesets would be:

$ hg pull $(hg root)/.hg/strip-backup/e1634a4bde50-backup.hg