title: synchronize a restored local copy of git repository
body: <p>My hard drive crashed recently and I went back to a recent backup of all my data.
  However I had some changes in a local git repository that I had not committed before the failure. Now I want to bring everything back to where it was before the hard drive failure.</p>
  
  <p>That is, I have a local copy of a folder that used to be connected to the git repository. However all the .git folders are missing. How can I synchronize the local copy with the repository, while keeping all the modifications that I had and did not commit to the repository?</p>