Can I recover a branch after its deletion in Git?

Question

If I run git branch -d XYZ, is there a way to recover the branch? Is there a way to go back as if I didn\'t run the delete branch command?

Answer 1

Adding to tfe's answer, you can recover with this process mentioned, unless it's commits are not garbage collected. Git branch is simply a pointer to a particular commit in the commit tree. But if you delete the pointer, and the commits on that branch are not merged into other existing branch, then git treats it as dangling commits and removes them during garbage collection, which it may run automatically periodically.

If your branch wasn't merged to an existing branch, and if it was garbage collected, then you will loose all commits up until the point from where branch was forked from an existing branch.