Microsoft KB Archive/173387

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Article ID: 173387

Article Last Modified on 2/24/2005



APPLIES TO

  • Microsoft Visual SourceSafe 5.0 Standard Edition
  • Microsoft Visual SourceSafe 6.0 Standard Edition



This article was previously published under Q173387

SYMPTOMS

After you have archived an entire database with the SSARC utility and you try to restore it with SSRESTOR, you receive the following error:

The path $/ is already in use. Cannot restore path from archive file.

CAUSE

The syntax you used was:

   SSRESTOR [-s path to srcsafe.ini] <archive file> $/ 
                

SSRESTOR attempts to create a new project in the target database, with the name of the project given in the SSRESTOR command. Because the root project ($/) will always exist in the target database, the restored root project cannot be created.

RESOLUTION

To resolve this error, either:

  1. Repeat the SSRESTOR command multiple times, once for each top-level project. -or-


  1. In the original project, share the entire project tree to a new project, and then archive and restore this project.


STATUS

This behavior is by design. According to the User's Guide (Appendix B page 219 for Visual SourceSafe 5.0), "if restoring attempts to create a duplicate file or project name, the restore fails."

MORE INFORMATION

If, for example you have three top-level projects:

   $/first
   $/second
   $/third
                

Resolution 1

Run SSRESTOR three times, each time specifying the name of one of the projects as the last argument (for example, SSRESTOR archive.ssa $/first). There are two disadvantages to this method.

If there is a large number of top-level projects, this process will be tedious, and there is no easy way to automate it. Any links (shared or branched files) between top-level projects and will be lost. For example, if:

   $/first/sub_one/myfile.txt
                

is shared to:

   $/third/sub_one/myfile.txt
                

then the files will not be shared in the restored projects.

Links that are within the same project tree are maintained, such as:

   $/first/sub_one/myfile.txt
   $/first/sub_five/myfile.txt
                


Resolution 2

There are three steps in this resolution:

  1. In the original database, create a new top-level project, (for example, $/root), then recursively share all top-level projects into $/root.
  2. Archive $/root.
  3. Restore $/root into the target database.

In this case all links at all levels are restored, the disadvantages of this method are:

  • With a large number of top-level projects, sharing them into $/root may be time consuming.
  • After restoring, you may want to move all the top-level projects back to being subprojects of $/, rather than subprojects of $/root. Again, this may be time consuming with a large number of projects.


Keywords: kbprb KB173387