I have this Mercurial repository where I keep a counter:
$ echo 1 > count
$ hg add count
$ hg com -m 'incrementing to 1'
$ echo 2 > count
$ hg com -m 'incrementing to 2'
So far so good, but then I committed a mistake:
$ hg com -m 'incrementing to 3'
So I use hg strip to revert this last commit:
$ hg strip --keep -r -2
saved backup bundle to /home/adam/sandbox/count/.hg/strip-backup/bda856a578bf-ff2b025f-backup.hg
Unbeknownst to me, I have committed another, bigger mistake! I stripped the two topmost commits, and I just wanted to strip the topmost one:
$ hg log
changeset: 0:7b5533cf962a
tag: tip
user: Adam Victor Nazareth Brandizzi <brandizzi@gmail.com>
date: Wed May 15 08:00:27 2019 -0300
summary: incrementing to 1
How I get my commits back?
NOTE: this is a contrived example of a case were I needed to use hg strip. No need to wasting time pointing out there are alternatives etc.
As I've learned from this message in Mercurial's mailing list, the solution is quite straightforward. Note that when I ran hg strip --keep -r -2 I got this line in the output:
saved backup bundle to /home/adam/sandbox/count/.hg/strip-backup/bda856a578bf-ff2b025f-backup.hg
So, basically, Mercurial made a backup of the original history! Now I just need to pull from it:
$ hg pull /home/adam/sandbox/count/.hg/strip-backup/bda856a578bf-ff2b025f-backup.hg
pulling from /home/adam/sandbox/count/.hg/strip-backup/bda856a578bf-ff2b025f-backup.hg
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 2 changesets with 2 changes to 1 files
(run 'hg update' to get a working copy)
$ hg update
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
My file is back to the original state...
$ cat count
66
...as well as my history:
$ hg log
changeset: 2:fc4d1cc18a4b
tag: tip
user: Adam Victor Nazareth Brandizzi <brandizzi@gmail.com>
date: Wed May 15 08:00:51 2019 -0300
summary: incrementing to 3
changeset: 1:bda856a578bf
user: Adam Victor Nazareth Brandizzi <brandizzi@gmail.com>
date: Wed May 15 08:00:38 2019 -0300
summary: incrementing to 2
changeset: 0:7b5533cf962a
user: Adam Victor Nazareth Brandizzi <brandizzi@gmail.com>
date: Wed May 15 08:00:27 2019 -0300
summary: incrementing to 1
Now I can call the right strip command (hg strip --keep -r -1).
You may have lost the backup file name (it did happen to me!) but you can find it in $YOUR_REPO/.hg/strip-backup. If you have many backups, just list them sorted by time, descending:
$ ls -tl .hg/strip-backup/
total 4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 adam adam 754 May 15 08:10 bda856a578bf-ff2b025f-backup.hg
-rw-rw-r-- 1 adam adam 754 May 15 08:02 02ac79859dd0-0902f53b-backup.hg
The last one is probably the one you want.