The safety net
What Innesta backs up before it destroys anything, and where to find it.
Three operations in Innesta destroy work, and all three take a local backup first:
- Discarding changes — a copy of what was discarded.
- A hard reset — a copy of where you were before it.
- Deleting a branch — a copy of the branch.
The backups are in the Recovery group of the sidebar, under
Discarded Changes, Hard Resets and Deleted Branches, and
they are kept for as long as Keep recovery backups in
Settings says: seven days unless you change it
to one, three, fourteen or thirty. What has expired is cleared when the
repository is opened or refreshed. Each of those three groups appears only when
it holds something, so a repository nothing has been destroyed in shows none of
them.
Why this changes how the app feels
Because the everyday operations that are genuinely irreversible on the command line are not irreversible here, the confirmations can be about attention rather than about fear. Innesta still asks before all three — and asks for a typed confirmation before a hard reset and a force push — but the question is “did you mean this?”, not “are you certain, because this is final”.
The one place the net does not reach is the one place it cannot: a force push changes someone else’s server. That is why it is the operation with the most friction in front of it.
Recovery and the reflog are not the same thing
They share a group in the sidebar, which makes it easy to think they are one thing. They are not.
The backups are Innesta’s. They hold discarded working-copy changes as well as commits, and they expire on the schedule Settings sets. A discard’s backup can be opened and read before it is restored, the way a stash can.
The reflog is Git’s own record of where every ref has been. It covers anything that moved a branch — including commits orphaned by a rebase or a reset — and Innesta lets you browse it to find a commit that no branch points at any more. It is not Innesta’s to expire.
Stashes sit in the same group and are neither: they are work you put aside on purpose, and nothing clears them but you.
Most of the time either one is enough. Having both is why a bad day in Innesta is recoverable.