title: Sync master branch with develop
body: <p>I'm a contributor to an open source organization and one of our developers was working with the master branch and wanted to sync master with develop. But due some conflicts and all the history got messed up a bit. I would like to know how can master be restored to it's previous state or the best thing be in synchronization with the develop.</p>
  
  <p>This is the repo for reference</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://github.com/systers/vms" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://github.com/systers/vms</a></p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT1</strong></p>
  
  <p>Till now, I have tried doing</p>
  
  <p><code>git checkout master</code></p>
  
  <p><code>git reset --hard develop</code></p>
  
  <p>This made my master in sync with develop locally but I'm not sure whether it's the best practice to do.</p>
  
  <p>Further, I plan to do</p>
  
  <p><code>git push --force origin master</code></p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT2</strong></p>
  
  <p>The above solution didn't work as <code>origin/master</code> is a protected branch. So, I got this error:</p>
  
  <p><code>remote: error: Cannot force-push to a protected branch</code></p>