title: Git | Restoring to a previous commit after merging and publishing
body: <p>We were in the middle of the release but wanted to merge release/xxx branch to develop so the hot patched changes are available in develop as well.
  But while working on it, our developer accidentally merged develop into release/xxx instead of doing it the other way around.
  Then he reverted that merge commit.</p>
  
  <p>Now the release/xxx branch has the code that it had before the merge activity but when we try to merge it to develop now, it is trying to overwrite the develop branch changes that were merged to release/xxx. I think this is happening because the release/xxx branch is ahead of develop branch and same files were updated when code was reverted.</p>
  
  <p>I need help with the following points:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>What are my options to go restore my release/xxx branch to the commit before the merging happened?</li>
  <li>I did some research and found out that the only way would be to use "git reset --hard " followed by "git push  --force"
  I read that force push can result in unexpected results. So I wanted to get some clarity on this as well.</li>
  <li>If I use force push on release branch, will it just reset release branch to the commit i want and won't delete any commits that were part of the merge that was done?</li>
  <li>Will it not affect other branches such as develop or master, if I do force push on release/xxx as the commits I am rolling back are part of the history of these branches also.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Please advise.</p>