Comment by jsmthrowaway

No, it isn't, if you're playing with surgical tools that disrupt Git history, which was my point. It's a lot easier to revert to before you started than attempt to abort out of a huge rebase/squash/ugly merge conflict hell/rewrite of history. I'm not saying back up before every commit. I'm saying when `git status` is three pages long, you have 14,000 conflicts, and you're on a detached HEAD God knows where, it's your choice to spend the next hour typing the right Git commands to get back where you wanted to be, or just back out and try again. I know which one I'd prefer.