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I have a bit of a puzzle at my hands: several previously-committed files disappeared over night, but there is not a single commit that shows they were deleted. How could that happen?

The situation is as follows:

  • I have a private Git repository on BitBucket, with a single branch.
  • There are 3 other people in my team, and everyone is using SourceTree as their git interface.
  • Yesterday I pushed a commit - and after it the repository was okay.
  • Since then all 3 other team members pushed several commits:
    • one was a local merge,
    • two were online (ie. through-a-webpage) README.md edits,
    • one was online (ie. through-a-webpage) deletion of a single unrelated file,
    • and the others were several commits with 1 or 2 files.
  • In the morning, I pulled the repository, only to find several different files, which were committed by different people at different times, were gone from the repository:
    • they are gone from the local copy,
    • they are gone from the Source page on project's BitBucket website,
    • they are gone from the .zip downloaded from the Downloads page.
  • However:
    • none of the commits after mine delete any of these files,
    • I can go to an earlier commit that modified one the "disappeared" files, go to its summary page, view its history - and none of the commits in it deletes the file either.
  • I double checked that nobody messed with .gitignore, but it was untouched since last December.

Also, as to further confuse the issue: several months ago I added files A.R and test-A.R in a single commit. Later I renamed the test-A.R to test.A.R. Now A.R is still in the repository, but neither test-A.R nor test.A.R is still there.

So, what could possibly cause the files to be deleted from Git repository without any of the commits actually deleting them?

PS. Of course, I filed a support ticket to BitBucket Support, but I'm not terribly confident they'll respond quickly.

halfer
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Dragomok
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1 Answers1

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It is likely that somebody forced a push (ie git push -f ...) meaning whatever is in their local history replaces the branch on the remote. There doesn't need to be a commit that deletes things, as you appear to assume. If a dev never synced their changes to see all the commits on the server and then force pushes their out-of-date history then you can lose commits. This is all assuming that by "private" repository you mean the devs in your small group can all write into the repo.

I would adjust repo, branch, or project permissions so this doesn't happen again. Or you can require that all users use pull requests if you are ok with moving to a gitflow or feature flow approach. Also make sure your devs are educated on how to use Git.

Just a guess here but likely if everyone made changes but several people lost their commits, then my guess is that whoever didn't lose any commits is the person at fault.

halfer
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jbu
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  • It turned out that one of the commits did indeed cause the files to disappear. I'll investigate further and either accept your answer (if they really did `git push -f`) or write my own (if the issue turns out to be something different). – Dragomok Jan 31 '17 at 11:10
  • @Dragomok: to add to this answer, see if you have a copy of this repo elsewhere. If a developer force-pushed, then all other devs would have the good original, and you can use that to recreate the tree as it should have been. – halfer Jan 31 '17 at 17:06
  • @halfer I have managed to restore the repo by consecutively using 'git reset --hard ...' until files reappeared, copying the files outside of repo, then resetting back to head and manually reinserting them back. For completeness sake: the fact that I managed to do that rules out that the push was forced, doesn't it? (The dev responsible for the whole kerfuffle didn't know what they actually did, so it's not like I'm going to get a definitive confirmation from them...) – Dragomok Jan 31 '17 at 19:52
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    @Dragomok: you can check what they did using `git reflog` on their machine, unless they have deleted their repo. It should give you an account of what happened. I'd personally prefer to play back changes rather than just commit missing files - it is nice to preserve file history as well as the files themselves. However, it depends on how much energy you want to expend on resolving the problem. – halfer Jan 31 '17 at 19:57
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    (You may wish to look into branch permissions, where devs who can't be trusted not to do destructive operations are not allowed to push to master). – halfer Jan 31 '17 at 19:58
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    @Dragomok _IF_ you pulled from the server and have the servers history of commits and you can do hard resets to get files back then yeah someone committed something to make the files disappear and your goal should be to inspect each commit to find out when the problem occurred. – jbu Jan 31 '17 at 23:19
  • This is an old thread but I am having a similar issue. A file was deleted during a merge. The merge shows 'no files changed' when you view it on github. But if you do a git log -m --full-history you can see the file was deleted in the merge. Requested a git reflog from the dev. – ickydime Jul 01 '20 at 22:49