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> as long as I keep their hashes

that means my hashes or their hashes or them keeping my hashes, I am never sure

you can just make a backup copy of .git or your entire project dir. When you get lost, just delete your .git, copy from the backup and try again

You never need to do that. git-reflog(1) is the most general solution if you will ever need.

if you're a beginner thats going to be very difficult, restoring the git dir a few times makes the learning process much faster, till it all clicks and you don't need too anymore

But then you have multiple copies of your repo which is inevitably going to end up with a my_project_v2_FINAL_3b/ mess, reminiscent of how people used to manage files before version control.

Not having to deal with all that is exactly what git is for.

I'm pretty comfortable with Git, but I've still done this a number of times, and in my experience this situation is very evitable. After I've completed my gnarly process (whether successfully or unsuccessfully), I just delete the folder I don't want to use.

Is this a joke? git's whole purpose is to save the history of your project and return to earlier versions when needed

It's a super simple solution for which you can be certain that you have all the knowledge needed to perform the restore operation.

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