I did that once and then rewrote the repo. Everything was fine for months on our team until another team merged their exact copy with new changes that broke what I was doing. Everyone senior left my team and it looked like I was doing nothing for 4 months. Communication should come first and the manager needs to step up.

I agree that communications is important and was the primary thing wrong here. It was more that even on top of that, they just sat there doing nothing vs. at least trying to be productive and figure it out for themselves.

And didn't you have backups of that repo?

Sure I have backups. The other group took a copy of the repo and changed it over a three month period and never checked back in. The versions were very different and merging my copy in was difficult and required a rethinking and rewrite.. in the end it became three separate components. All of this happened during a management change so the timing wasn't perfect.

It also appears to assume that someone could help them. There are plenty of times where knowledge of a project or component is simply lost, either the developers don't remember or are gone, it's one of the costs of employee turn over.