Files disappeared from repository, but there is no deletion in commit history

Question

I have a bit of a puzzle at my hands: several previously-committed files disappeared over night, but there is not a single commit that shows they were deleted. How could that happen?

The situation is as follows:

• I have a private Git repository on BitBucket, with a single branch.
• There are 3 other people in my team, and everyone is using SourceTree as their git interface.
• Yesterday I pushed a commit - and after it the repository was okay.
• Since then all 3 other team members pushed several commits:
  • one was a local merge,
  • two were online (ie. through-a-webpage) README.md edits,
  • one was online (ie. through-a-webpage) deletion of a single unrelated file,
  • and the others were several commits with 1 or 2 files.
• In the morning, I pulled the repository, only to find several different files, which were committed by different people at different times, were gone from the repository:
  • they are gone from the local copy,
  • they are gone from the Source page on project's BitBucket website,
  • they are gone from the .zip downloaded from the Downloads page.
• However:
  • none of the commits after mine delete any of these files,
  • I can go to an earlier commit that modified one the "disappeared" files, go to its summary page, view its history - and none of the commits in it deletes the file either.
• I double checked that nobody messed with .gitignore, but it was untouched since last December.

Also, as to further confuse the issue: several months ago I added files A.R and test-A.R in a single commit. Later I renamed the test-A.R to test.A.R. Now A.R is still in the repository, but neither test-A.R nor test.A.R is still there.

So, what could possibly cause the files to be deleted from Git repository without any of the commits actually deleting them?

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PS. Of course, I filed a support ticket to BitBucket Support, but I'm not terribly confident they'll respond quickly.

Answer 1

It is likely that somebody forced a push (ie git push -f ...) meaning whatever is in their local history replaces the branch on the remote. There doesn't need to be a commit that deletes things, as you appear to assume. If a dev never synced their changes to see all the commits on the server and then force pushes their out-of-date history then you can lose commits. This is all assuming that by "private" repository you mean the devs in your small group can all write into the repo.

I would adjust repo, branch, or project permissions so this doesn't happen again. Or you can require that all users use pull requests if you are ok with moving to a gitflow or feature flow approach. Also make sure your devs are educated on how to use Git.

Just a guess here but likely if everyone made changes but several people lost their commits, then my guess is that whoever didn't lose any commits is the person at fault.