Subject: Re: rebuild repo from data, packfiles?

From: tom fogal <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 20 Nov 2010 19:44:52 -0700

Hi John, thanks for the help.

Jonathan Nieder <[email-masked]> writes:
> tom fogal wrote:
> 
> > Long story short, I lost some metadata in a repo I've got.
> > However, my entire .git/objects/ && subdirs is intact, so I'm
> > hopeful my data's still accessible in some form.

Turns out I'm dumber than I thought =(. I had a lot of trouble with
trees seemingly becoming invalid after a bit... my shell history's got
an rm -r and deleted a lone packfile before I thought "what the hell am
I doing?!" and stopped, so that must be it.

> Here's what I'd suggest.
[snip]

The repository-layout info and the lost-found option to fsck were both
new to me, and quite useful.  Thanks!

Where I'm at now: through lost-found, mucking with metadata enough
that git-log and format-patch work, and re-creating a repo to apply
patches onto, I've got a lot of my work back.  There's a 3 or 4 week
gap though, and of course git has trouble dealing with that; some of my
"patches" actually add entire files and the like.

If I git cat-file -p all of the `commit' and `blob' sha1's in
.git/objects, it looks to me like all my code is there, I just need to
get it out somehow.

My thought is to cat-file all my commits, filter out the ones which are
upstream, order them by date, and git-am them back into a repo.

Some of my data only exist in blobs, though... maybe git-diff-tree
can get me the patch I need?  Not quite sure what to diff it with,
though... maybe the most-recent sha1 I have, based on date?

Other ideas would certainly be welcome!

-tom