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Migration of partial history from VSS to TeamFoundation

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I have an VSS repository i have been using for past 5 years but i do not care for history beyond 2 years. Moving to Teaamfoundation i would like to discard that history. How do i do that?

Either you can use archieve feature in VSS to remove that history from VSS. You can find this in documentation of VSSConverter. But this process can be cumbersome as there is limit to the size of history you can archieve. So you may end up doing archieve of individual folders.

The other option could be a hack (I have come to love this word after my experience in converters :)) based on implementation of incremental migration feature of VSS and this is what we are going to talk about in this blog.

So we just added incremental migration to VSSConverter that looks for checkin comments for figuring out if its a incremental migration and from which point in time it should restart migration. Knowing this we can fool converter by modifyng the required checkin comments to start migration from where ever we want. This can be used to do migration of partial history of VSS. How to do this:

  1. Do a snapshot checkin from the point you want your migration to start.
  2. Add the project mappings to the top level folders (destination folders in settings file) in the checkin comments.
  3. Add a timestamp to the start of checkin comment of last checkin under the destination folders. For instance add "{3/10/2003}" if you want to migrate from 3/10/2003 onwards.
  4. Run the VSSConverter and you have your partial history migrated :).