restore-deleted-files-from-old-commits.md

Restore Deleted Files from Older Commits

Ugh. So I saw a bug logged today due to a missing piece of code. What?! That was there yesterday! Turns out I had deleted the file by accident and not realized it.

Find the Commit Which Deleted the File

This article talks about How to find and restore deleted files with git, and wonderfully explains the first step: discovering the offending git commit.

git log --diff-filter=D --summary

This will give you a log of all commits which deleted a file. The --summary will also show which files were deleted.

Restore the file from the commit

Given commit ID 123x7x, run this to restore the file(s)

git checkout 123x7x~1 myFile

There's also a score of great answers on this StackOverflow question as well.