Undo safely

What you will be able to do

• Discard unstaged edits with git restore
• Unstage with git restore --staged
• Revert a commit with a new undo commit

Why this matters for data work

Mistakes happen. Safe undo means you do not rewrite commits already on origin/main. Prefer restore and revert over hard reset on shared branches.

Concepts

• git restore file — drop unstaged edits
• git restore --staged file — unstage
• git revert HEAD — new commit that undoes last commit
• git reset --hard — destructive; lab-only when you are sure

Practice on your machine

cd ~/dcubes/git-lab/init-demo
echo "oops" >> README.md
git restore README.md
git status

echo "temp" > temp.txt
git add temp.txt
git restore --staged temp.txt
rm temp.txt

echo "bad" > bad.txt
git add bad.txt
git commit -m "Add bad.txt accidentally"
git revert --no-edit HEAD
git log --oneline | head

What you should see

• README restored before commit.
• Revert commit on top of history; bad.txt gone from latest tree.

Common mistakes

• reset --hard on main after push — hurts collaborators.
• Reverting merge commits without reading docs — advanced.

Next

Repo hygiene for pipelines