smith.david•3mo ago

Git seemed pointless until I lost a day's work

Backing up my code with commits now feels essential, not extra.

4 comments

4 Comments

shanen313mo ago

Even with commits, I've lost work, so it still feels like extra steps.

murphy.margaret3mo ago

Look at your commit habits, not just the tool itself (sounds annoying, I know). If you're doing giant, messy commits once a day, it's like saving over the same file again. Try making tiny commits for each small change, even just fixing a typo, so you have way more save points to roll back to. That granularity saved me more than the commit button ever did on its own.

charles6383mo ago

Losing work with commits sounds wild to me, I always thought that was the whole point. Are you maybe rebasing or force pushing after you commit? Those tiny save points should make it almost impossible to totally lose changes.

ivans313mo ago

Watch out for only committing locally without pushing though. I mean, those tiny commits only save to your machine until you push them up. I once lost a whole afternoon of small fixes because I kept making commits but my hard drive crashed before I pushed. Maybe it's just me but I treat local commits like a sticky note now, they don't really count until they're on the server.