• initialize the directory as a git repo (which I already did)
• connect the initialized local repo somehow to the remote one.
• Then create a branch based on the structure of the master branch of the remote repo (without losing any files on the local repo).
• finally, push the code in the local repo to the newly created branch in the new repo.

what I have done so far is:

cd my-project
git init
git fetch
git checkout -b new_dev_branch
git add .
git commit -m "first trial"
git remote add origin path/to/remote/gitlab/my-project.git
git push -u origin new_dev_branch

But the problem is that it didn't create the branch with the structure of the master as I wanted in step 3.

Any ideas?