Merge new revisions from original git repository with modified repository

Question

I'm sorry It's kind of tricky to explain but essentially.. I'm trying to create a copy of an existing repository. But would it be possible to still get updates from the original repository without it ruining my own changes to the modified repository?

Answer 1

That is no problem at all.

You create a copy of some repository using git clone, which will create a new repository and a remote with all its remote branches.

You can see your local (possibly modified) branches with git branch and the remote branches with git branch -r. You can update the remote branches with git fetch.

This should be pretty much everything you asked for. - Most probably you also want to integrate your changes with those from upstream. Assuming you have a local branch (e.g. master) tracking a remote branch (e.g. origin/master) you can just use git merge or git rebase to get a combination of your changes and those of the original repository.