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Comment by formerly_proven | Hacker News Reader

> I'm terrified I'll gut the repo by getting a flag wrong.

There are pretty few operations in git which can't be undone by a quick glance at git-reflog.

Or even just frequent backups. A coworker of mine used to copy the entire on-disk repository including the .git directory before doing anything slightly unusual in git. Very paranoid I thought, but then he could recover from a fat-fingered wrong flag very quickly.

"Or even just frequent backups."

? Well, git is supposed to be that 'history' for us. I understand it's not exactly a backup, but it is pragmatically that. I don't want to have a 'backup of backup' I want to feel confident with what's there.

Which is ironic since source control is supposed to prevent the need for manually making backup copies.

> Or even just frequent backups. A coworker of mine used to copy the entire on-disk repository including the .git directory before doing anything slightly unusual in git.

To recover from commit screwups, it should be enough to just export the git repository somewhere else like a remote repo, or even just apply changes in a separate branch.

It just seems that a developer is doing something extremely wrong with their repository if they can't recover from their experiments by checking out a branch or commit.

Or slightly more comfortable —- create a temp branch before doing something. Of course that’s basically the same thing under the hood.

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