Recovering a file git never committed

BhaveshSGupta@gmail.com (Bhavesh S. Gupta) — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0530

A few days ago a colleague came to me with a file that was gone. It was part of a product feature that had already been built twice, each time taking a couple of months, and nobody wanted to build it a third time.

The product was built with ASP.NET Web Forms and kept in git. In Web Forms each page is mainly a pair of files: an .aspx file with the page’s markup, and a .cs “code-behind” file with the C# that runs on the server. Visual Studio usually adds a third, generated .designer.cs file. The missing file was ImageCropping.aspx.cs, the code-behind for an image-cropping page in the product’s media upload section.

My colleague had been working on it for a while, and it had never been committed. git log had nothing to show for it, and neither did the reflog.

We got it back anyway, because at some point they had run git add on it, and git keeps what you stage.

In short: git add writes a copy of the file into .git/objects the moment you stage it. A git reset --hard, for example, removes a newly added file from your working tree, but the copy stays in the object database, unreferenced, until garbage collection removes it. git fsck --unreachable lists these copies. Search them for a string you know was in the file, then copy the right one out of .git/lost-found.

Bash on Everyone Has a Story

Recovering a file git never committed