All repositories reported as missing

Describe the bug

Git Desktop can’t find any of my existing repositories. I cannot commit to any one of them, app reports it can’t find them, but they are all present and git folders exist too.

Version & OS

Git Desktop 2.6.3 on Windows 10 (1909)

Steps to reproduce the behavior

1. Go to Current Repository selector
2. Click on any one of the repositories on the list.
3. See the error

Expected behavior

Expected the repository to be selected and its changes to be displayed for commit.

Actual behavior

Repository won’t load, says it Can't find "<repo_name>". Also, it shows a It was last seen at "<repo_path>" message.

Screenshots

Logs

Did not locate related errors in the logs, attached below.

2021-02-18.desktop.production.log

Additional context

Tried running git status on the command line, to no success.

fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

It says not a git repository although the git folder exists, and also does not seem to be corrupted.

Tried deleting an unchanged local repo e re-cloning it, it works (for a while).

remote: Counting objects: 70, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (67/67), done.
remote: Total 70 (delta 33), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (70/70), 391.15 KiB | 73.00 KiB/s, done.
Updating files: 100% (57/57), done.

But after some seconds, it will fall into the same can't find "repo_name" error.

Also tried reinstalling the Git Desktop App, it did not seem to help.

[steveward]

@jairoalves you can drag-and-drop multiple repositories into GitHub Desktop to add them. That may be quicker if you need to add a number of repositories.

We have seen cases like this in the past where repositories have been lost after updating (see https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/10548). Did this happen after the application updated?

[JimHokanson]

I had to do some command line work so I recently added a SSH key and installed Git for Windows and did some global config edits (Using windows git client, what I thought was the same as my GitHub account info). Suddenly many of my private repos were not found (repos I had not touched with the git command line) and when I tried to manually add them GitHub Desktop said they weren’t git repos. Fortunately, I updated GitHub desktop and then it prompted with with warnings for these repos - something to the effect of the repo might be unsafe and that it is from another user and wanted to know if I should add the repo to a trusted list. Fortunately that seems to have fixed the problem. Maybe the new update truly fixed the problem or maybe it reset some state. If it is the latter, I wonder the errors about a missing repo or the folder not being a repo are, in some cases, this untrusted repo case, and the error handler is too generic … (i.e., something went wrong, repo must be missing).