Rolling back a delete

I was working in my test repository and I just deleted tags and all beneath
it. I had about 50 or 60 tags there each relating to about 1gb of source.
I'd like to roll back the change, but the red bean book suggests using
merge. Alas, merge seems to require a working path. I don't want to
download all that source.
 
Is there another means of rolling back a change that doesn't require a
working directory?
 

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Peter Kahn
pkahn@connected.com