A safer git checkout

Perhaps I'm missing something, but in years of development using git as our scm, I have never used checkout -f. I've used reset --hard HEAD here and there. Is there any difference in their use?<p>Also, are there a lot of developers who work for hours without committing? I've only found myself in a situation where I could possibly lose hours of work a few times and each time this happens I realize I was treading thin ice.<p>Lastly, and maybe this is also just me, I keep my repos in Dropbox. Github is our main repo store, but I've got an extra level of protection, especially since Dropbox allows you to rollback file changes.

I've been using Git for a couple years now, and I don't think I've ever lost any work.<p>Even if you do `git reset --hard HEAD~5`, "throwing away" your last few commits, they aren't actually discarded yet. You can do `git reflog` to see them and then `git checkout -b some_commit_hash` to recover one to a branch, or `git reset --hard some_commit-hash` to set this branch back to that point.<p>Only if those commits stay orphaned for a while (a week or two?) will Git truly discard them.

Dear author: the plural of alias is aliases.

Why not just use git stash?

I don't see how git-cof is different/better than git-stash.