Source Safe is Great!

[szlamany]

We had a major server meltdown - life was looking bad...

We were able to zip up our source safe folder tree (1/3 gb, 5000 files in 50 subfolders)...

Upon re-creating a new SMALL BUSINESS SERVER - installing SOURCE SAFE - and simply unzipping the VSS folder - everything is back to normal. All our carefully guarded source is available for the office to checkout, checkin, review history for changes...

I am one happy person

[dglienna]

Lucky, also.

[si_the_geek]

Cool, it's good to hear a success story - especially after the 'naysayers' of VSS

Am I right in thinking that you are/were using VSS 6.0d?

[szlamany]

We did put 6.0d onto the server now - I do not know if that was the version we had before, as that server is toast

It was such a relief to restore a huge folder-worth-of-files and still have it recognized by the client machines - even after we renamed the server and created a different domain!

BTW - we did have backups of the entire server as well as making zip's before nuking it...

[dglienna]

Hope you scanned them before you loaded them. Not sure if vss files can be compromised, but I'd rather play it safe than sorry.

[Merrion]

Yeah - it might be worth running Analyze.exe in the VSS bin directory to check your archive integrity...

[Hack]

Cool, it's good to hear a success story - especially after the 'naysayers' of VSS

I agree and I'm going to save the link to this post as an example for the next time someone blasts VSS.

[RobDog888]

"Analyze and Fix" should be run on a regular interval (weekly) to keep your vss db in top running shape. Think of it as a Compact and Repair for an Access database type of utility.

Si, VSS can integrate with VS.NET 2003 but I am unsure about 2005.

[szlamany]

RD - where is ANALYZE and FIX in the ADMIN program? I cannot find it...

[si_the_geek]

I think it's a separate program, which should be on the start menu (if not, it should be in the VSS folder, and have a fairly obvious name).

[RobDog888]

Its in the MS VS 6.0 > MS VSS > Analyze and Fix VSS DB menu.
"?:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\Common\VSS\win32\ANALYZE.EXE" -f -c -d -v1 "?:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\Common\VSS\data"

You need to read up on it as there are different option that you may want to do when executing it. Also, depending on your db size it will take some time to do and you need to interuptions of network or your system or it could damage your db. Read the info in the help file as its gives some good info on it.

[szlamany]

Thanks - found it - ran it - it found no errors in the 4 passes that it did...

I guess that's pretty good for 3 or 4 years of never running it!

[RobDog888]

But the switches are what tells it what to do, analyze, analyze and fix, report, or such. Cant remember, was 2 years ago when a project got corrupt in vss and I had to research it. Got it fixed too.

[szlamany]

It was in the ALL PROGRAMS/VISUAL SOURCE SAFE option under start...

It was there as ANALYZE and also as ANALYZE and FIX.

I'm assuming that the GUI MENU selection selected the switched for ANALYZE and FIX.

[RobDog888]

As such in life, Never assume anything