17d62de1495d4404f6fb385bdfd7ead5c897ea22 -

— is a 40-character hexadecimal sequence. That length and format strongly suggest it’s a .

So 17d62de1495d4404f6fb385bdfd7ead5c897ea22 is a ghost. It means something to whoever created it, but unless they left a key, it’s meaningless to the rest of the world. 17d62de1495d4404f6fb385bdfd7ead5c897ea22

You reconstruct fragments of the repo from memory caches found elsewhere on the drive. After days of brute-force merging, you find it: — is a 40-character hexadecimal sequence