SourceSafe: Can it recover deleted files?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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?

Answer 3

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.