Restoring a deleted branch

Deleting a branch in Innesta takes a local backup of it first. Restoring is a matter of finding it under Deleted Branches in the sidebar’s Recovery group and pressing Restore Branch, which appears on the row as you point at it.

The backup is kept for as long as Keep recovery backups in Settings says: seven days unless you change it.

What comes back is the branch, pointing at the commit it pointed at when you deleted it — and only that. The upstream it tracked is not part of the backup, so a restored branch shows no ahead or behind counts until you choose its upstream again or push it.

If it is not there

Two other routes, in order of ease:

The reflog. Git records every position every ref has held, and the commit that was the tip of the deleted branch is in there. Innesta shows you the reflog but will not branch from it, so turning that hash back into a branch is a line in a terminal. See find a commit that has disappeared.

The remote. If the branch had been pushed, deleting it locally did not delete it on the server. Switch to the remote branch and Innesta creates the local tracking branch again.

Why the local backup exists at all, given the reflog

Because the reflog answers “which commit was that?” and the backup answers “which branch was that?”. Finding a commit id in a reflog and knowing that it was the tip of feature/parser-rewrite are different problems, and the second one is the one you have at the moment you realise you deleted the wrong branch.