title: (Mercurial/tortoisehg) Lost commits - how to troubleshoot
body: <p>A colleague of mine was working on a VS project this morning, which he claims was in a folder clone of our central repository. He built a release version of the application which is still there with the correct date/time stamp on it. </p>
  
  <p>He then said he committed several times during this time, but at some point, he tried pulling down changes from the central repository and merge them in with his changes. He can't really remember what steps he took, but the end result is that all the changes he did to the source were lost. now, i'm trying to help him to see if we can recover any of those changes.</p>
  
  <p>He told me after he committed his changes (several commits), He went into the tortoisehg workbench, pulled, and saw that there were many changes in the central repository. He decided to either "Merge with local" or "Update" to the tip pulled down - he can't remember which. I showed him the two dialogs, and asked him if he discarded changes, shelved or anything else. He couldn't remember, really, but he did remember he had to back out because tortoisehg didn't like what he was doing. Eventually, he did seem to be able to update to the repository tip.</p>
  
  <p>I'm thinking that unless he physically deleted the folder in which he was working, and then got the latest, those commits he claimed to have done would have been recorded somewhere? What are common errors people do when pulling the remote repo? Are there any log files or history i can check to see if i can salvage or at least tell where he was working on this stuff?</p>
  
  <p>any hints to troubleshoot this would be greatly appreciated.</p>