I was working recently with multiple branches at once (3 branches to be exact, let's call them A, B and C).
I was on branch A and then decided to switch to B, but I had some work, not ready for commit. So I stashed it and switched.
After I reveiwed code on B, I switched to C, to make some immediate corrections. Again, I needed to switch to B, so I stashed them.
Then I decided to switch to A branch, in order to start working from last "checkpoint" I applied last stash.
Then strange things started to happen - I was seeing partial changes from branch C.
I know it is messy workflow, but today it happened to me...
Since I didn't merge anything, how is it possible to happen?
...the worst part is I deleted all stashed except one I appied, thinking it is some old, unnecessary stash.
It's all about stashes...
They are shared between branches. If you stash work on one branch it can be easily applied (so, it is visible from other branch) on another branch.
I must have applied stash from branch C to branch A. That's why I was seeing partial work from A - because I applied only a stash, not whole branch.
HOW TO RECOVER LOST STASH
When stashing, the special kind of commit is
After deleteing it, it still can be found in GIT history, as @Code-Apprentice mentiond and can be inspected with git reflog, which is just shhortcut for
git log --reflog --oneline
In my case lost commit appeared as:
b10b2fc (refs/stash) WIP on branch: 78beda0 [COMMIT MESSAGE]
So I can merge this commit into my branch (it means to me a couple of conflicts, but it is better than just redoing everything):
git merge b10b2fc