As I am not familiar with the details of reflog (I don't recall ever using it) I took a look at the article. I wasn't long until I reached what looks like a caveat: "This command has to be executed in the repository that had the lost branch. If you consider the remote repository situation, then you have to execute the reflog command on the developer’s machine who had the branch." Joe, who works on another continent, quit last week and his computer was a VM...

OK, so we have backups of his VM and we can recreate a clone of it, but will that be satisfactory? Are there any issues with hardware MAC addresses or CPU ids? How far down the rabbit hole of git minutiae do you have to go before you are confident that you can do all basic source-control operations safely?