Question: Today I worked with MS Visual Sourcesafe, that is to say Microsoft's Sourcecode destruction system, which has never ever saved anything, but already destroyed much.
Today I had one more of those nasty destructive episodes:
I was working on a reporting service report (*.rdl xml files).
I was modifiying a report, so I created a copy and modified it.
The original being named FILENAME.rdl
My modified copy being named FILENAME2.rdl
I finished, saved. Checked in.
It was all correct.
I switched offline, continued to work.
Later on, I deleted filename.rdl, and renamed filename2.rdl to filename.rdl
I continued working for the rest of the day offline.
In the evening I checked in, and filename2.rdl reappeared.
I thought it had copied the old version back, so I deleted filename.rdl (from local computer and sourcesafe, via the delete keyboard button in the visual studio treeview) and wanted to rename filename2.rdl again to filename.rdl.
When I tried, I realized that filename2.rdl was just an entry that appeared in the treevieww, but not on disk... It was in that very momement that I realized that I now have a problem...
I looked in the recycle bin, but nothing there.
I tried 5 different undelete programms, and shadow copy explorer [to find out that non C drive data - such as the data partition e - is not backed up by the shadow copy service automatically...], but no luck. The file is gone.
Is it possible to still retrieve the file from sourcesafe, or does it get permanently removed when one presses the delete button in VisualStudio treeview and clicks OK on deleting it from file & sourcesafe ?
So far I found this one:
http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;244019&x=11&y=7
but from that it is unclear whether the file is gone.
The problem is if it isn't there, I should redo the about one hour work this evening, because tomorrow will be a busy day.
There are 2 levels of Delete in SourceSafe. When you delete the file, if you check the "Destroy permanently" option, the file will not be recoverable. Otherwise, you can go to the Properties of its parent project and recover it later.
If it's not stored under some different version or branch of your code, I think you're out of luck.
Regardless, however: you estimate this is one hour's worth of work. You already (presumably) spend some amount of time (probably an hour or two) trying to get the file back. Are you not now at the point where, even if VSS has a way to get your file back for you, you'd be better served just rebuilding it?
Short answer - definitely NO!
It can't! I tried.
But it overwrote the recreated report with a completely wrong recovered version...
Fortunately, I've forseen this, and made a backup copy of the recreated report for this case.
So I didn't spend that one hour of recreating the report in vain.
This program should be forbidden, with noncompliance to this prohibition being subject to the death penalty.
Related
So recently, all files of a python project which I had been working on for weeks got accidentally deleted, and then I emptied my recycle bin, so it is gone now.I tried to "Restore Previous Versions" of the folder it was in in windows, but it said that there were no previous versions. So I tried using a disk drill to recover those files, but i could not even find them in the list of files that it came up with. So is there a different setting/configuration on disk drive which could be preventing me from recovering those files? Do I need to use another recovery software?Or is it going to be hard/impossible to recover the file? I have been working on this project for a long time, so any help would be hugely appreciated
If you do this on VSCode while using GIT. Recreate the file in the location you deleted it, then right click on the file and select file history. You should be able to restore most, if not all, of your data.
Just happened to me, figured this might help someone else in the future.
If you don't have any shadow copies to restore a previous version from, then speicalized undelete tools are your only hope. However, if the sectors containing the deleted files' contents have been overwritten since deleting them there is a chance all is lost.
A couple of people have asked a similar question, the last one a year ago, with no solution (Here and here), so I thought I'd try it again.
I've created snapshots in Xcode 5.1 on a few occasions before making significant code changes. When I go to restore them, I've seen a couple of different behaviors:
There's one file that changed. Xcode shows me the before and after diffs, and I say OK, and click on Restore. The result, nothing's changed.
Same as one, except in this case there are multiple files that have changed. It shows me one, and it looks good. So I click Restore. It doesn't show me any of the other files diffs that have changed, and it doesn't prompt me to be sure I don't want to look at them. After the fact, I've surmised that I need to click on each changed files in order to accept the changes. But still, there's only one Restore button, which dismissed the window. In any case, none of the files have been restored to their former state. If I try to restore from that same snapshot again (naively thinking I could try to retrieve the other changed files), it tells me that the current state and the snapshot are the same.
If I export the changes to another directory, then I do get the reverted files. It's when I do a File->Restore Snapshot where I get no results.
I've taken to manually creating zip archives of the source so I can recover the files manually.
I don't have any Source Control in use in Xcode so far. It seems I should do that if only to do periodic commits on my own.
Do other people use snapshots successfully? Has anyone else experienced this behavior in Xcode 5?
Thanks much for your help. I've yet to get any response on the Apple Developers Forum on the topic :(
-Eric
I pressed Alt-E which I mistakenly thought was Merge Changes In Merge Tool, however, that was actually Keep Local Version. Is there a way to go back? Is there a way to find out what was merged, as in what file? Ugh! :(
I have completely stopped working in case I erase something of importance.
I'm using MSVS 2013 Professional.
Here's another possible approach.
If you know what version of the code you started with before you started making your current batch of changes, you can grab a copy of your local workspace files. Then Undo all your Pending Changes. Then delete all the files in your local workspace (in Windows explorer). Then do a Get Specific Version to get back the old version of the files from where you started, then copy-paste in your updated files from your backup copy. Then do a Get Latest. This should retrigger the Merge process.
I don't know a great answer to this problem, but I do know one thing you can do (I hope you don't have a massive amount of pending changes, or this will get tedious).
The problem is that TFS thinks you have now merged the server changes (other devs changes) into your workspace, even though you told it to basically toss them. If you try to check-in now it will blow away other developers changes in TFS.
What you can do is go through each file in your pending changes window, and do a Compare With Latest Version. This will show you the differences between your local file, and the file in TFS. You will notice two types of differences:
the changes you made which you can just skip past.
Changes that other devs made and are on the server, these differences will show up as though you have deleted/undone that code locally
For the changes that other devs made, you will have to manually reapply them in your local workspace before you check-in.
I inadvertantly did a very stupid thing last night. I have been working on an iPad project for a couple of months and (even more stupidly) do not have a backup. By right-clicking on the project in XCODE, I mistakenly clicked "Discard Changes"
(stupidity reigns again) I did not have any commits since the initial and when I did the Discard Changes, it seems that it went all the way back to the initial commit, which if I am looking at things correctly looks like each file is as it was the very first time it was saved.
My question is: Is there a way to recover my work? Is it in the .git directory? Is a copy stored elsewhere? or as a last resort, any chance to recover some of the source text with an un-delete utility?
Thanks,
Bob
For little clarification.. one can put back files from the trash as discard changes sends the file in the trash
Answer copied from How to undo xcode discard all changes if not committed
Quit Xcode.
Open the file you wish to bring back your lost changes to using TextEdit.
Go to File -> Revert To -> Browse All Versions...
Scroll through the available versions. Hopefully you will have many available to choose from.
Select a version and hit Restore.
Follow 1-5 for all necessary files.
Launch Xcode. You should now see the M next to these files in Project Navigator indicating they include uncommited changes (the changes you previously discarded).
Completely new files you may have created and were discarded can be found in the Trash.
Also a small piece of advice. If you are in need to discard changes, prefer using Source Control -> Discard Changes by right clicking on files in the Project Navigator, instead of Discard All Changes which might give you all kinds of trouble.
Have a nice day. :)
Well luck was on my side after all. As it turns out, when I did the Source Control > Discard Changes operation, it did not make any changes to the source code save in my project directory. I was able to start a new project and added the files back in. Once I did that I was able to compile and run my project in the simulator just as it was before the incident. I now have a backup as well as committed the changes in git.
You have a hope of fetching this code if you "pushed" & committed your prior-to-discarded changes into your local git repository. Or if you're using MacOS's included Time Machine or some other automated backup solution.
Aside from that, you might be hosed.
If you're on Lion or later, you may have Time Machine backups even if you don't have an external drive. As of Lion, Time Machine will take 'local snapshots' of files; this is how they support the "Versions" feature that lets you go back to previous versions of your files.
If you didn't have Time Machine turned on, though... you may be out of luck.
I am using Visual Source Safe 2005 and Visual Studio 2008.
##$% this Source Safe. With programs like Source Safe that ##$% up my data, who needs viruses, hard drive failure, and other assorted calamities.
My story starts with getting my workstation re-imaged on Monday this week. After the machine was re-imaged, I downloaded from Source Safe the source code I was working on. Thursday afternoon, I noticed that as I was working on my source code, the files were not being automatically checked out from Source Safe as I worked, however there was no problem saving my work on the disk.
So... I needed to check in my work. I noticed that the files (not checked out from Source Safe) were not read-only as they usually are, so I made them read-only.
I feel like I should have backed up my data locally at this point and I'm now kicking myself for not doing so, but the next thing that I did was I went back to Visual Studio to continue my work and see if I could get the program to automatically check out the files I was changing.
The first time that I began to edit a file (BigLongCodeFile.cs), it automatically checked out the file for me as I had hoped. However, in a split second it displayed a dialog that explained, "Your action caused a check out of file(s) BigLongCodeFile.cs, and a new version from source control has been loaded in the develpment environment. Please re-do your changes if necessary." And just like that, Visual Studio undid all the changes I had done to that file since Monday, representing hours of lost work for me.
It didn't prompt if I wanted to do this, just showed me a dialog informing me that the damage is done. With development tools like this, who needs a virus to destroy his work?
Is there some way to get my data back, or some way to avoid this?
The mistake was setting the flag back to read only, which was exacerbated by not making a copy of the files when you found things were not getting auto checked out from SourceSafe. Unless the new copy was written to a different location on the drive, which is unlikely, you are currently hosed. If it could possibly be saved elsewhere (note I am talking physically saved, not logically saved (ie, what you see in Windows Explorer == logical)) you can use an undelete utility. It is a long shot, but you can try undelete tools; I would not hold out much hope.
One of the first things to do when you find source control is not working correctly, and you have altered files, is to make a backup of the folders you have worked on. A simple copy of the structure to a temp location is good enough. Then fix the source control issue and be prepared to consolidate your efforts. There are tools for this, if you are worried someone else might have edited files.
As for why VS did not warn you? The file was flagged as if it was not changed. VS noticed something after the save operation (size change, most likely) and warned you something was in error.
In the past, I have been burned by trying to second guess software, so I know the pain. That is why copy backup is a good practice when you notice something strange. This is less problematic in TFS, but I would imagine it might just overwrite a file that appeared to be checked in (read only flag set) as well.