Hi I had last week a corrupted git repository caused possibly by a forced shutdown, I had to re-clone my repository to a new place and apply all my changes. Lucky me , I had a backup out of the git repository. The following takes 1 min to apply and may save you lot of work in case something gone wrong. The following command will create a directory named as your current git branch under ~/backup/patch and will backup there all your branch work copy the following lines to your ~/.bashrc alias gitbackup='br=$(git symbolic-ref HEAD 2>/dev/null | cut -d "/" -f3);rm -f *.patch;git format-patch origin/master;mkdir -p ~/backup/patch/$br;mv *.patch ~/backup/patch/$br' alias gitrestore='br=$(git symbolic-ref HEAD 2>/dev/null | cut -d "/" -f3);git stash; git checkout master;git checkout -b "$br-restore-$(date "+%d-%m-%y--%H-%M")";cp ~/backup/patch/$br/*.patch .;for f in $(ls -1 *.patch) ;do git am --ignore-whitespace $f;done' to backup your branch just run from your current git branch In any case you have messed up with your branch (and you have a backup), you can run from your current git branch this will create a new restored branch named <your-original-branch-name>-restore-<date> and apply on it your backed up patches.