IMO a cleaner way to do this is with a headless remote, either on disk or “backed up” on a server. `git push —-all` won’t delete refs on the remote, so you don’t have to do any additional work to record or recover them.

`git push —all backup` will record all of your refs and tags

If you are archiving branches in your own rep, prefix with `ar/` so you can grep -v to conceal them.

See also `git notes` to record metadata an against a commit without changing the commit