This article contains some very dangerous advice. In particular it says that the difference between reset--hard and checkout is merely down to the working tree

This article contains some very dangerous advice. In particular it says that the difference between reset--hard and checkout is merely down to the working tree changes not being preserved. What it does not mention is that reset will obliterate commit history subsequent to the requested revision 5f1bc85. From the source: Here’s me being straight up loco and resetting the head of my working tree to a particular commit: $ git reset --hard 5f1bc85 The –hard option says to erase all changes currently in my working tree, whether they’ve been registered for a checkin or not (more will be said about this command later). A safer way to do the same thing is by using checkout: $ git checkout 5f1bc85 The difference here is that changed files in my working tree are preserved.