Before we start, it's worth noting that whatever you want to stash away and revisit later, it'd be safer if you could just commit it on a new (probably temporary) branch. Stashes are actually commits under the hood after all.
Technic-wise, there still exist the stash commands, right? So here goes. Say you stashed your working tree as well as your staging area away with git stash push, and at some later point you want to summon them back with git stash apply (try avoiding git stash pop at all times, which is even more disastrous). Now guess what? Only your working tree is back, not your staging area. You actually need particular options with git stash apply to revert what an option-less git stash push does.
| Command | Option | Saved/Restored | Reverted to HEAD |
| git stash push | "" | working tree + index | working tree + index |
| "--staged" | index | index | |
| "--keep-index" | working tree + index | working tree | |
| git stash apply | "" | working tree | N/A |
| "--index" | working tree + index | N/A |
Finally, again, do yourself a favor and forget the whole stash concepts.
