Hello. Linux experienced user here, but with no development or git experience ever. This directly leads me to my biggest trouble with git-annex because I constantly suffer from misunderstanding each and everything. That being said, my problem is the following: I had the terrible idea to have my .thunderbird directory synchronized over several machines, leading the thunderbird profile to total corruption because after a few weeks I finally managed to have multiple machines accessing it. As I started trying to recover, things got worse and this is my last seek for help before starting over by creating the repositories from scratch.

What I did:

1. I did some research on how to recover an old state of the repo, which should not have been a problem because there is a "full backup" repo. I came across this [1] page and the pain started with me looking for my wanted commit to roll-back in "git log" and then did some tries in the way something like, "git checkout -b old-state4 012345678".

2. Of course this recovered the whole repo and not only thunderbird, so I used a file synchronizer to put everything else back into place after the action.

3. Unfortunately, the "branches" seem to have been messed up and the repos are no longer in sync.

This is what the machine says that I have used to create the mess:

[2016-03-08 19:15:26.915116] Pusher: Syncing with host123
(recording state in git...)
To ssh://user@10.0.0.1/mnt/foo/bar
   d35c699..fed0636  git-annex -> synced/git-annex
   a44bfb2..818b7b5  annex/direct/old_state4 -> synced/old_state4

This is what another machine says:

[2016-03-08 21:17:48.649949] Pusher: Syncing with host123
(recording state in git...)
To ssh://user@10.0.0.1/mnt/foo/bar

   423f50f..4c8fad8  annex/direct/master -> q/annex/direct/master
   2a67458..fed0636  git-annex  -> host123/git-annex
   6a1076b..4c8fad8  master     -> host123/master
   7f55414..818b7b5  old_state4 -> host123/old_state4

Long story, short...

I apologize for being a total git noob while at the same time performing git magic leading into a total desaster. However, I hope someone can give me a hint what to do to have the "old_state4" solved?

Also, I really would like to get used to the git internals but since git is quite powerful, I always get overwhelmed because the tutorials out there are either developer-focused (which I'm not in the correct target group) or they simply cover each and everything (which is of no use because I don't want to administrate a GitHub repo but a private git-annex for my files and documents).

Thank you so much!

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4114095/revert-git-repo-to-a-previous-commit