History editing in Git is actually perfectly safe. The old commits will (at least initially) still be there, though you may need "git fsck --unreachable" to loc

History editing in Git is actually perfectly safe. The old commits will (at least initially) still be there, though you may need "git fsck --unreachable" to locate them if you don't remember the hashes or have them in your reflog anymore. What is unsafe in Git is garbage collection. Commits that aren't reachable from either a branch or the reflog will be deleted after a grace period (assuming that you don't disable garbage collection entirely). More importantly, unreachable commits will also not be pushed with "git push" (which means that if your laptop blows up, you may not be able to recover them from a repository server). This happens not directly as a consequence of history editing, but generally because a branch is being pointed to a new commit or removed (which also implicitly happens during history editing).