I’ve used Git for 20 years now and wrote a book about it.

The biggest mistake most sources make when teaching about history rewriting is omitting these two lessons first:

- it’s easy to lose uncommitted data in Git and hard to lose committed data

- given this, learn how to use ‘git reflog’ to see what you’ve done and how to undo/redo it (as this post recommends but, even then, a little too late)

If you just get in the habit of constant committing and checking reflog: you’ll never lose data.

(Related lesson from my 10 years employed by GitHub: they almost never do the git gc you’d expect to remove commits so once you push a commit: it’s likely there forever and identifiable by that same hash from anywhere in the fork network. This can be bad/scary so be aware).