Using SourceGear Vault for Source Control ![[Registration never required for free content]](/images/free.gif)
By: Joel Martinez on Thursday, March 23, 2006
Reader Level: 
I was busy finishing up a feature on our company's intranet while the rest of the IT department scrambled
to do a full backup in anticipation of a hurricane.
I just had a few more lines of code to write before I could finish up and go home to prepare. As I typed the last few characters
and did some testing, I declared the feature done! Gushing with happiness that I was finally ready to go home, I checked the relevant files into
Visual SourceSafe.
But elation was not what the fates had planned for me. No, panic ... panic was the order of the day. The check-in
process threw some error which my brain has long since purged at this point. The check-in operation was a failure, along with
every subsequent attempt to try it again. As I went back into Visual Studio to look at my code, to bask in the warm glow of
success, I was horrified to find the files empty ... completely devoid of content.
Nooooooooooooo!
In desperation, I figured I would simply get the code from the repository again and re-implement my changes. Sadly, all history
for the files were nowhere to be found in SourceSafe. Turns out that at the exact moment that I tried to check-in my code, IT
was backing up that server. Because Visual SourceSafe is a file-based source control tool, it apparently was not happy about
trying to change the files while the backup was in process.
Needless to say, I suggested we migrate to another source control tool ASAP.
This is a review of SourceGear's Vault, a source control
tool designed to be a compelling replacement for Visual SourceSafe.
