Deleting and restoring branches

Deleting a branch that has been merged loses nothing: the commits are on the branch you merged into. Deleting one that has not been merged loses the commits that were only on it.

Innesta will not let you find that out afterwards. Before deleting, it shows a preview of the commits at risk — the ones that exist only on this branch and would have no other name pointing at them.

If there are none, the preview says so and the deletion is uneventful. If there are some, you are looking at exactly what you are about to give up.

Restoring

Innesta takes a local backup of every branch it deletes — kept for seven days unless Settings says otherwise — and the Recovery section in the sidebar is where you restore from. See restoring a deleted branch.

That is a backup Innesta made, and it is separate from the reflog, which Git maintains anyway. Both are usually enough on their own; having both is why deleting a branch here is a smaller decision than it is on the command line.

Remote branches

Deleting a local branch does not delete the remote one. They are separate refs that happen to share a name, and Innesta keeps that distinction rather than tidying both away on your behalf — deleting someone else’s copy of a branch because you were finished with yours is not a favour.