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+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