How to Recover Lost Commits with git reflog

What I Wanted to Do

I accidentally wiped commits with git reset --hard and panicked thinking they were gone for good. Turns out git reflog records every HEAD movement — even “deleted” commits are still recoverable.

What is git reflog?

git reflog shows the full history of where HEAD has pointed, including commits that no longer appear in git log.

git reflog

Sample output:

a1b2c3d HEAD@{0}: reset: moving to HEAD~2
e4f5g6h HEAD@{1}: commit: add form validation
i7j8k9l HEAD@{2}: commit: implement login feature

How to Recover a Lost Commit

Step 1: Find the target commit in reflog

git reflog

Note the hash of the commit you want to restore (e.g. e4f5g6h).

Step 2: cherry-pick the commit back

If you only need that one specific commit:

git cherry-pick e4f5g6h

Step 3: reset to that point

If you want to restore everything up to that commit:

git reset --hard e4f5g6h

Recovering a Lost stash Entry

If you’ve lost track of a stash, reflog can help there too:

git reflog show stash

Or find all dangling commits with fsck:

git fsck --lost-found

Things That Tripped Me Up

• Reflog entries expire after 90 days by default — act fast if you need to recover something old
• Reflog is local only; a fresh clone won’t have the history
• If you already force-pushed the reset, the remote is gone — only local reflog can help
• Work on --orphan branches sometimes doesn’t show up in reflog

Related Articles

• How to Undo a Git Commit (Before and After Push)
• git cherry-pick: Apply a Specific Commit to Another Branch
• How to Use git stash to Save Work in Progress
• How to View Commit History with git log
• Git Rebase: How to Keep a Clean Commit History

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