[guenthert]

> Hg and RCS are the only VCSes I’ve seen require data to be recovered from a backup due to normal usage.

Count yourself lucky then. Git was well known for losing data, so much, that it was featured at xkcd [1]. Well, perhaps not the tool itself, but it's user interface was (more than it is now perhaps) so awkward that users often got it wrong. If you don't make that back-up, you might not even know how much you've lost.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1597/

[acdha]

That’s not really what that xkcd is about but that was kind of my point: it’s a long-running joke but it’s not really true – in reality Git makes it really hard to lose data, and most of the time when people say they lost data what they really meant was that they had a sloppy merge and needed help using reflog to retry it.

I’ve worked in modest sized teams within a larger organization (roughly a hundred developers) and have often been the person people ask for help when something goes wrong; most of our teams went from CVS / Source Safe to Subversion, and then Mercurial to Git, and the big step was really the switch to a distributed system - moving from Hg was largely a non-issue (things got faster, we liked GitLab more for other reasons). The only time Hg lost data was back in the era when rebase was an extension, so it wasn’t the core system’s fault but it was a source of friction.