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version-controlvisual-sourcesafevisualsvnversion-control-migration

How to make a backup of Visual Source Safe before migrating to SVN

I am beset by my lot using VSS 2005 (8.0.50727.42) as source control, which I really struggle to get on with. I am proposing moving to SVN http://www.visualsvn.com/server/ and have found a tool which appears to do the migration along with pulling all the history across - in order to keep my fellows happy. - http://vsstosvn.codeplex.com/ (if anyone has had any success or experience with this would be interested to hear your thoughts)

however, in order to make sure this works I would like to do a trial run, but have no idea how to take a backup of the existing VSS in order to do so.. as this tool appears to also deal with changing all the source control bindings in the solution, so if it goes tits up I would probably be beaten..

can I simply make a copy of the folder structure in which the srcsafe.ini resides? its just that seems to have all kinds of crap in its data folder.. folders called a b c etc..

any help much appreciated

thanks

Solution

  • I've used the VSS2SVN command line client in the past and it worked OK. I think it was hindered somewhat by how VSS had been abused (poor commit messages, commits to single sporadic files) so that the commit history was only loosely useful.

    I can't remember how I worked it but it was probably just following the documentation for both VSS2SVN and VSS.

    The documentation for Visual SourceSafe (appears to be the 2005 version going by the "What's new" pages) has instructions on how to backup and restore a VSS database with history. You can do it all from the administrator interface and restore to a new location, or there are command line clients to do it.

    Notice the warning that users cannot be using the database while you make the backup and the analyze utility cannot run. This implies that it's probably just a simple file copy over the network with no protection or locking in the database. You'll probably need to schedule the backup around your users (it was OK when I done it as there was only three of us).

    Edit: I've found a blog article which summarises the options for doing a VSS backup, which seems familiar so I might have referenced it when I performed our migration. The outcome of that is that yes you can just copy the directory with all the VSS information, but again you need to be sure that the database cannot be modified while it is being copied.