How do I fix project after "Remove From Version Control" corrupted it?

[Guest]

I am using RoboHelp 9.0.1 and installed both Tortoise SVN 1.6.9 and latest PushOK SVNSCC then added my large RoboHelp project to SVN. I was able to check in and out files from SVN but had several issues with it:

1) Super super slow. Working with folders or any renames would take 10 seconds per file and up to 1 hour if needed to refresh the root folder.

2) I could not perform some actions at all, such as delete, rename, or move folders. I kept getting COM errors.

I therefore decided that working with SVN and RoboHelp is not practical, at least not on my VPN so I decided to disconnect the project from source control and just work locally. The only option that I saw that sounded like it would do that was the "Remove from Version Control". This started a process that lasted for several hours. At the end of it, I now have several significant issues:

1) The order of the files and folders in my Project Manager is completely wrong now. I have almost 1000 topics and reordering all of them is not possible.

2) The Table of Contents, Glossary, and Index files appear empty. They had content before.

2) A couple of the Single Source Layouts I had created are completely missing.

3) Many, but not all, of the folders have tons of files with the extension ending in "_temp_removed_by_svn"

4) Many, but not all, of the files are actually gone from SVN so I can't recover a clean image. There was no warning that this command would actually delete the files from SVN (I thought it would just remove the version control connection).

5) Who know what other issue exist that I haven't seen.

Any idea how I can fix this?

Thanks in advance,

Dan

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi Dan. It is difficult to advise on your issues without narrowing down whether the problem is with SVN or your RoboHelp project. It seems like you are only having problems with one project. Try creating a brand new project with just a few topics and Commit that to SVN. Does that suffer from the same performance issues? If yes, the problem is with your SVN set-up and I'd advise speaking to someone who can help you internally. If this project's performance is OK, then we know the issue is with your RoboHelp project. In this case, how big is "big"? Can you give us an idea of numbers/size of images, PDFs, multi-meida and baggage files? Also how big is your project's CPD file?

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The RoboColum(n)

@robocolumn

Colum McAndrew

[Guest]

Hi The RoboColumn,

The CPD file is currently 1,284 KB. As far as the size of the project, it's hard to asses how many files and folders there are because of all the SVN stuff, but a rough estimate should be about 2,866 HML files (22 MB), 462 images (1.5 MB), maybe 800 folders (22 top level, each with 0-10 children). The !SSL! folder is excluded so no generated PDFs are stored in version control.

I'll try a new project to test the original performance issue, but my main concern now is to recover my main project.

Dan

[RoboColum_n_]

Are the "_temp_removed_by_svn" files in your local folder or SVN? Let us know how you get on with the new project. It sounds like something is wrong with SVN. Can you use the SVN Log command to see whether there is a different version you can restore. This might also give you an indication of what might have caused the problem. You could try deleting your CPD file. It gets rebuilt it is isn't there anyway. This file can become bloated and it is good practice to delete it when it gets close to 2mb in size. Your project is fairly large and has a lot of folders and may affect performance. Have you considered splitting them and merging the output? I know you probably don't want to consider this right now, but I think it may be a better long term solution.

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The RoboColum(n)

@robocolumn

Colum McAndrew

[Amebr]

Regarding the slow source control access, this could be caused by antivirus software scanning every file access. I believe our antivirus is set to only scan incoming files, not outgoing and this solved our slowness problem with VSS many moons ago. (You should have the same antivirus setup as the developers, assuming in-house development).

[Guest]

The "_temp_removed_by_svn" files are in my local folders.

I have not had this problem with any other project on SVN. I do know that I did get occasional COM errors when I tried to use the integrated SVN when I tried to do things like delete or rename folders.

Why did the "Remove From Version Control" command actually DELETE my project from SVN without warning? I just wanted it to remove the version control link in my local project. I think this feature should have a clear warning!

Here is what I ended up doing:

1) Renamed the old local foler.

2) Checked out from SVN the revision before the deletes occurred to a new local folder.

3) SVN checked out 1,078 (3.17 MB) in 40 seconds. This appears to have restored all the files to the new local folder.

4) Opened my project in RoboHelp. It displayed the half transparent "Progress..." window in the lower right corder and a "Fetching file list for" in the status bar for each folder and file in my project. Each entry had the progress bar continously going from 0 to 100% multiple times and took about 10-12 seconds to move to the next folder. The text next to the progress bar said things like (703 / 690 kb / 1kbps) with the first two numbers updating at just over 1 kb per second. I don't know if this is RoboHelp, Pusk OK, or Tortoise SVN being this bad, but since the original checkout through Tortoise with all the files only took less than a minute I can only assume that it's either RoboHelp or Push OK. It looked like this was going to take several hours and when I realized that it was deleting the files I had just recovered I killed the process.

5) So I deleted the contents of the folder and again checked out the revision before the deletes in SVN.

6) This time I exported my local copy to itself. This effectivly removed it from SVN.

7) Opened my project in RoboHelp. It complained that about the lack of source control but got over it.

So I am no longer going to use SVN with RoboHelp. It seems that it won't work reliably.