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Howto recover lost commits from a git rebase

Yesterday, I was working on a branch of a branch in a git repository, and I wanted to merge the last branch back to master. Following chapter 3.6 of ProGit, I ran

git rebase --onto master branch1 branch2

Unfortunately for me, I seem to have either done it from the wrong place or done the wrong thing for my situation, because git rewound branch2 to the revision that it was branched from master and all the later commits were inaccessible!

However, I was not going to give up quite so easily, and I figured that once a revision was committed, it had to be somewhere.. Fortunately for me, I manged to find this post on how to recover lost commits in a git repository – I subsequently ran:

git reflog show
# find the commit with the last set of changes in your branch - 
# good commit comments are so useful!
git co b6654bd
git co -b branch2_2

With my branch recovered, I did a simple rebase of the new (old) branch onto master and merged it, and all was well.