A walkthrough for undoing changes in your current branch but backing them up to another branch for future use.

save-changes-and-revert-current-branch.sh

# WARNING: seriously please be careful with this if you don't know what you're doing.
# Reverting,  resetting, and force-pushing are all actions that can make you lose work.
# If you lose that work you will be unhappy and your coworkers will hate you.
# You've been warned.

# okay, so if you’re on the branch that has the work
# (let’s assume master) the flow looks like this:

git checkout master
# you should already be here but all the same...

git checkout -b backup/my-feature

git log
# make sure that you're definitely on the new branch and it definitely has your work in it.

git push
# this should just work assuming you have your git config set to 'simple'
# make sure that your new branch made it to github.

git checkout master
# now that we have a backup go back to modify the original.

git reset --hard head~5
# or however many commits. maybe do it 1 at a time just to be safe.

git log
# double check that you've reverted to exactly the commit you meant to

git push --force
# Push the stable changes out to origin
# WARNING: THIS IS DANGEROUS AND CAN IRREVOCABLE DELETE WORK ON THE REMOTE
# the --force flag is necessary since your head will be behind the remote head.