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Comment by AcerbicZero | Hacker News Reader

About half the time I get stuck during squashing and rebasing I end up trashing everything, re-cloning the repo and just doing one commit with all my changes from the other branch. Much easier than trying to figure out what series of errors or issues git is having.

Fundamentally, this is my fault - I don’t have a good mental model of git, and even when I do have a solid understanding of what I’m attempting to achieve the actual repos/situations I find myself in rarely line up with the examples to any useful degree.

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'git reflog' is your friend as it keeps a history of local operations, then you can do a 'git reset --hard HEAD@{X}' where X is the point in your reflog before the rebase started.

While this is true, it's also more of a crutch. You should practice to predict, before your rebase, what conflicts your are gonna hit. And aborting a rebase is a significantly safer option. I would only recommend reflog when you rebased (on) the wrong commit and you want to undo a successful rebase.

I do the same unfortunately. I have a cheat sheet text doc called Git Shit that I use to attempt to keep track of the myriad ways to do shit in git. What a lot of people don't understand is that one wrong move and you've LOST ALL YOUR WORK! Which I have done enough times that I take the safe way that you describe a lot of times.

As long as your source and target branch are present on the remote (i.e. github/lab/whatever) you probably don't need to trash the entire repo. Just `git --rebase abort` and if you're halfway through a rebase just delete your local source branch and re-fetch it from the remote. That's my process anyway if I somehow lose track of what I'm doing. Or sometimes as a reference I just open the remote branch in github/lab/whatever directly so I have a little cheat sheet, since the "current/incoming" somehow always confuses me.

Before I rebase, I always create a "backup" branch (`git branch backup`). Then if I mess up, I can always reset back to it (`git reset --hard backup`). Maybe better than trashing and re-cloning :-)

You could just preserve the history (= don't use rebase, just merge), it has benefits too in addition to making your immediate life easier and safer.

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