Introduction: Recovering Deleted Files in Git

It was late, the weather was foul, and my Wi-Fi decided to have an opinion. Something went wrong during a sync between two machines, and the next morning I discovered that an entire folder of images had quietly vanished from my Git repository. Not overwritten — deleted. Gone from the working tree and staged as deletions in the last commit.

If this has happened to you, take a breath. Git keeps the entire history of your project, including every file that was ever committed. Nothing is truly lost as long as the deletion was committed (and not just a git rm you haven’t committed yet — that is even easier to undo). Let me walk you through exactly what I did.

How to Restore Deleted Files in Git

Step 1 — Find the commit that deleted your files

Git’s --diff-filter option lets you filter the log to show only commits that match a specific kind of change. The flag D means “deleted”:

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

The --summary flag prints a brief list of files added, deleted, or renamed in each commit — which is exactly what we need. You will see output like this:

commit 45a2d299ef3d....
Author: Elena Daehnhardt <email@gmail.com>
Date:   Wed Nov 29 12:05:06 2023 +0100

    create_references

 delete mode 100644 images/ai_art/dalle/elena/dall.e.22.18.39.png
 delete mode 100644 images/ai_art/dalle/elena/dall.e.22.18.45.png
 delete mode 100644 images/ai_art/dalle/elena/dall.e.22.18.50.png

There it is. Copy the commit hash — you will need it in the next step.

Inspecting what changed at a commit

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Conclusion: Git History as a Time Machine

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References

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