Comment by paultannenbaum

Glad you figured it out! Having that much work on a single branch is a process smell in itself, ideally you would have found a way to get that code into the repo before it became that large (break down the work into smaller chunks, hide behind feature flags if needed, etc.). Beyond what you just described, reviewing that much work is nearly impossible to do correctly.

At the very least, if you are going to have a long lived branch, make granular commits and push to a remote repo frequently. That will give you a distributed backup strategy.