I am using Windows 7, perforce 2010.2 Yellow client.
I was trying to mark some 6 files for deletion. But accidently, it marked the entire depot for for deletion (could be my mistake).
But strange behavior is it marked for delete in less than a second (more than 1,00,000 files), but reverting took more than 5 hours.
Does anybody know how it works internally? Or any guesses?
As James said, the p4 delete removed all 1,000,000 files. Reverting that requires the client to re-download all 1,000,000 files.
Related
- how to uncompress perforce Depot files?
The files I have now ending with [,v] and some files end with [,d] containing [1.1.gz].
What i did In details:
In P4V I created a Workspace, put some important files, Submitted it to the Depot then decided to delete what's in the Depot by clicking Mark for Delete it just mark it with a red X what I think, So I head to C:\Program Files\Perforce\Server\depot and deleting it from there, now the files in the Recycle Bin but doing so doesn't make it disappear from P4V so I opened P4Abmin in the Depot tap I did Obliterate and its gone finally.
Later discovered that Marking files for Delete in the Depot delets it from the Workspace, and only thing that I have is what I restored from the Recycle Bin and it's compressed files, how can I uncompress it.
Don't touch the Perforce server's depot or db files unless you know what you're doing -- normally the server handles the job of managing those files and the relationships between them, and randomly messing with those files will usually break things, much like if you randomly shuffled blocks on your hard disk around without knowing how your filesystem works. I mention this first so that you'll know for next time, and second so that if you happen to have access to a time machine, you can fix this problem by going back and informing your past self to keep their paws out of P4ROOT. :)
If in the future you want to temporarily delete files from the depot, use the normal "Mark for Delete" command in P4V (or p4 delete in the CLI) followed by "Submit". If you want to permanently delete them, that's what the "obliterate" command is for. In neither case should you be deleting files out from under the server -- everything should happen from the client (that is, P4V, the p4 CLI, P4Win, etc).
If you restore the deleted files to exactly where they were, you should be able to rely on Perforce to get the files back, provided you have not already obliterated them from the db. (Hopefully obliterate noticed the archive files were gone and it failed with an error instead of blasting the db entries...)
If you no longer have the db entries for the files, you can try to extract the archives manually with command line tools (luckily the content isn't encrypted or in a weird proprietary format) -- you should be able to gunzip the .gz files and co (RCS) the ,v files. I'd expect most unzip utilities to understand gzip, but RCS is a pretty old format so you may have to do a little digging to find Windows tools for it (I think Cygwin may have RCS tools bundled with it). Good luck!
I've googled this, and saw that someone had a similar problem here -> stackoverflow, but as luck would have it, unresolved.
I have an issue where my P4 client is not able to see or access any submitted files that are newer than 4 months old.
Background - My root directory/db files are on D drive which is undisturbed. I got a nasty virus yesterday, so I checked in all my workspace stuff and recovered to a December drive of my OS. Now that I've successfully booted up in my December version of my OS (where the same version P4V and P4A is already installed), my P4V is only able to see and access files up to 12/15/2015 - nothing after. The drive image I recovered from is dated 12/19/2016. Yet, I can physically inspect all my post Dec P4 checkins in the physical location of my DB on D drive. It's ALL THERE.
Here's really interesting info - out of curiosity, I recovered back to my Virus laden OS from yesterday. Opened up P4V, and it is able to see and access all my files up till my very last submitted file which was checked in yesterday.
Other important into
- The depot, stream, and workspace that my p4 is using is the same between my recovered Dec recovery OS, and yesterday's Virus laden OS. Nothing was ever changed in my P4 settings.
System info:
Windows 10
P4V and P4A - NTX64/2014.3/1007540 (for both my recovered windows image from Dec, and yesterday's virus laden windows)
P4 is my achilless heel. Help appreciated. I will not take offense if you explain things to me like a 3rd grader.
Cheers,
Paul
First off, I used incorrect terminology in my original question. I had my depots on D drive and everything else in their default locations on C.
Where I had it wrong: in the belief that as long as I had my depot files backed up to a safe location, I was protected. There is more to it than that :|
What went wrong: When my PC crashed, I recovered to a 5 month earlier December version of my Windows install which means (obviously) I have December's install of P4 with database files only aware of files I checked in up to December. I did indeed have 1000s of files check in after Dec, all alive and intact, but P4 is simply unaware of it. An assumption (which I had) that P4 simply peeks into the Depots to stay up to date of their contents is an incorrect and dangerous one.
To those who may benefit: For those do-it-yourselfers, these are the 2 things in Perforce you should be backing up if you want to be able to do a full recovery later down the line when things go bad:
Database files. By default, they live in the Perforce application’s “server” directory. For me, there are 67 database files in my C:\Program Files\Perforce\Server. They are all prefixed with db.* and it’s these files that P4 uses to “know” the current state of things, like, your changlists, checked-out files, all your workspaces and their settings, depots and their settings, etc, etc etc. Oh, and what files you even have in your depot! Unfortunately, when backing up database files, you can’t just copy/paste them, but must use command line commands to properly generate 2 other file types (journal, checkpoint) specifically for recovery purposes. It is these files that you'll generate new database files from in a recovery operation.
Depot directories. Depots specify directory trees that your files get stored to, and checked out from when working in your workspace. Files stored here won’t be in their native format, and non-binary files will have their contents tweaked on top of that. Depot directory trees can be manually copied/paste to a backup location.
Proper backup/recovery information can be found here. Like many things, it’s simple once you understand it, but reading this is a bit of a mouth full. It would have helped me to just see slightly fleshed out sample commands along with the reading material, so I’ve included some here. These are the bare minimum command line commands (plus other manual stuff), and will recover a checkpoint, not checkpoint + journal (again, take a look at the link to get a better understanding). Also, I would recommend practicing backup/recovery in a safe throw away environment (or throw away assets) to get the hang of this before doing it for real.
---------- Backup ------------
Despite all the material in the link, it only takes a bare minimum of 3 command line commands (plus other non-command stuff) to do a proper P4 backup, and 1 cmd (among other things) to recover on my end. Again this is only a partially fleshed out sample to illustrate what the command prompt portion of backup/recovery looks like. There is a little more to it than simply running these to get you where you want.
(note: On Windows, you may need to start a windows command prompt as administrator)
>p4 set P4USER=superuser_name
>p4 -q verify //...
>p4d -r "C:\Program Files\Perforce\Server" -jc <yourBackupDirectory>\<prefixOfYourChoosing>
---------- Recovery ------------
>p4d -f -r "C:\Program Files\Perforce\Server" -jr <yourBackupDirectory>\<prefixYouChose>.ckp.1
In my case, I had to use the -f flag due to errors when not using it.
Cheers,
Paul W
Colleagues,
I have two different directories:
- path/animals/dir1
- path/cars/dir2
I want to move dir1 into path/cars/ with keeping all history of this folder.
I tried several ways: merge, copy and rename/move using P4V,
but all of them leads to erasing history in moved directory.
If there is a way how can I do it?
Thanks in advance!
We have used p4 move extensively in recent versions of P4 to do these kinds of directory moves.
In my experience, if you branch/delete (or more recently move) the files, you'll have the history of the original location intact (with delete/move records), but if you look on a revision graph in P4V, you should see all of the older revisions in the previous locations before they were moved (deleted).
If you use p4 sync with a particular date or changelist, you should also get the original directory back with the versions of the files at that time (and the newly moved versions should be removed after the sync, assuming both directories were in the area that you were syncing).
I have experienced problems (this probably will change in 2013.2, as I've read that Perforce is changing the default integration engine) with integration across move/delete and move/add transactions which require the use "generation 3" integration option, but once that's specified (which you can do by adding a -3 to the command line p4 integrate command, everything works better for me across those moves.
The history of the moved directory has not been erased. I'm guessing you think this is the case because the files are longer visible in P4V. By default, P4V does not display deleted files in the depot tree. Since you moved the files to a new location, they were deleted from their old location and are now no longer displayed. You need to turn on the option to "Show Deleted Depot Files". If you click on the yellow funnel icon to the right of the Depot/Workspace tabs you'll see that option. Check it and P4V will then display the deleted files in their original location.
While moving folder to another destination all history still present but only for appropriate files, not for a directories.
Here is a proof:
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.perforce/19820
Let's say I have a project under //depot/MyProject. At changelist 1001, this project took a major change in direction, changing everything about it. At changelist 2001, it got p4 deleted. The depot is now at change 3000.
I'd like to restore //depot/MyProject back to its state at changelist 1000. Specifically, I'd like the revision history to record the fact that change 3001 is an integration of change 1000 - i.e. the last version of this project before the major change.
Can Perforce do this at all? Or do I have to rename it into something like //depot/MyProjectOriginal, because //depot/MyProject is now tainted with all those deleted revisions?
(the naive attempt to p4 integrate //depot/MyProject/...#1000 //depot/MyProject/... fails with an "all revision(s) already integrated" message)
You cannot force the integration.
You have two options: you can create a branch using changelist 1000 as the base; or sync to changelist 1000, check out all files, and then submit (a.k.a rolling back).
Option 1
If you do want the history of your changes between 1001-3000 (i.e. a fresh start from changelist 1000) then this is the better option. Using P4V, create a new branchspec and then perform an integrate from your current project to the new branch at changelist 1000. This will be submitted as changelist 3001, when you compare differences between revisions, you will not see of the changes between 1001-3000.
In the P4 visualizer this will appear as a new branch creation at 1000.
Option 2
Sync to changelist 1000, check out all files, and then submit. There should not be any conflicts to resolve. This will be submitted as changelist 3001, however when you review history you will see the everything.
I hope this makes sense, any questions, please ask.
I don't believe that you can integrate files on top of one another like that. I think that you have two options.
If you are willing to move the files, you can do a
p4 integ //depot/MyProject/...#1000 //depot/MyOriginal/Project/...
and that will integrate MyProject at changelist 1000 to the new location.
If you'd like to keep the project at the same place, you can do that as well. It's really easiest in p4v - you can right click on the folder in workspace or depot view and choose "rollback...". In the subsequent dialog, you can then pick a changelist (or date, revision, etc) to roll the folder back to. In your case, I think that you would choose changelist 1000. Stick the files into a new pending changelist (I think that this is always good practice). You can then run a preveiw (to see what would happen), save the contents to a new changelist (so that you can inspect file contents before submitting), or just go for broke and pull the trigger and submit (I generally wouldn't recommend this).
HTH
Just do:
p4 copy //depot/MyProject/...#1000 //depot/MyProject/...
This also make a nice revision graph.
Though there is an accepted answer and plenty of other solutions, none of them works for me coz I need to rollback a large directory (with GBs of data)
Here is the way I used, which works fine for huge directory:
(Suggested to do in a new and clean workspace, though not strictly required)
Assuming the directory to rollback is //depot/foo/bar and you want to rollback to changelist 1234
Make sure no one is locking any files, and make sure the directory you are trying to rollback exists in your client spec
p4 copy -v //depot/foo/bar/...#1234 //depot/foo/bar/...
p4 submit
p4 copy -v is the meat of the solution. It tells Perforce server to perform virtual copy, which means Perforce copies the files but not actually in your workspace. This avoid huge data transfer for file content (when copying and when submitting). In my case, by using "rollback" in P4V (which is doing non-virtual copy), it took over an hour just for copy, and over an hour for submit for my folder. With virtual copy, whole process took me around 1 minute.
The most important thing is, it keep a sensible history. You can see your files being updated and rolled back, and all previous history exists.
use
p4 integrate -f //depot/MyProject/...#1000 //depot/MyProject/...
The -f flag means force an integration even if they have already been integrated.
From http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.current/manuals/cmdref/integrate.html
Can I rename a folder in Perforce from //depot/FooBar/ to //depot/Foobar/?
I've tried this by renaming from //depot/FooBar/ to //depot/Temp/ to //Depot/Foobar/ but the end result ends up the same as //depot/FooBar/.
Once it is in Perforce, the case remains set. As mentioned by Johan you can obliterate, set the name up correctly, and add it in again. However, there is a slight gotcha....
If anyone else (running Windows) has already synced the wrong-cased version, then when they sync again the right one, it will not change the case on their PC. This is a peculiarity of the Windows file system acknowledging case but still being fundamentally case-independent.
If a number of users have synced, and it is not convenient to get them to remove-from-client too (and blasting the folders from their machines), then you can resort to a dark and dirty Perforce technique called "Checkpoint surgery". It's not for the fainthearted, but you do this:
Stop your server, take a checkpoint.
Using your favourite text editor that can handle multi-megabyte files, search & replace all occurances of the old case name with the new. You could of course use a script too.
Replay your checkpoint file to recreate the Perforce database meta data.
Restart your server.
This will affect all user client specs transparently, and so when they sync they will get the right case as if by magic.
It sounds hairy, but I've had to do it before and as long as you take care, backup, do a trial run etc, then all should be OK.
Maybe not needed anymore, but here's the official Perforce HowTo about changing file cases on Windows and Unix: http://answers.perforce.com/articles/KB/3448/?q=change+file+case
I'm not sure about directories, but we've had this problem with files. To fix it, we have to delete the file, submit that change, then p4 add the file with the correct case and submit the second change. Once that's done, unix users who have sync'ed the incorrect-case file have to p4 sync, then physically delete the file (because p4 won't update the case) and then p4 sync -f the file.
Our server is on Windows, so that might make a difference.
I guess it treats files and folders the same.
For files:
It depends (on whether you have a Windows or Unix server). We have this problem with our Windows perforce server (which versions our Java code), where very occasionally someone will check in a file with a case problem (this then causes compile errors because it's Java). The only way to fix this is to obliterate the file and resubmit it with the correct case.
I think you should remove the Perforce Cache, so that your modification can be shown.
You can rename with ABC rename to abc_TMP, then abc_TMP rename to abc, then clear cache.
Setps to clear cache:
Open windows user home folder (on windows7 ==> C:\Users\)
Locate the folder called ".p4qt"
Rename the folder to "old.p4qt"
Launch Perforce, now everything works!
NOTE: these steps will rest your default setting.
The question is over 3 years old, but I ran into an issue like this while doing a Subversion import into Perforce and figured the info I got could be useful to some. It's similar to the obliterate method, but helps you retain history. You use the duplicate command that may not have been available back then to retain the history. The process basically being:
Duplicate to temporary location.
Obliterate the location you just duplicated.
Duplicate from the temporary location to the renamed case location.
Obliterate the temporary location.
Through this you retain the history of file changes, but get them all in the new path as well. Unfortunately there will be no history of the path case change, but that seems to be unavoidable. Similar to other methods mentioned here, users will need to either manually rename the directories in their workspace or delete and re-sync to get the new path name.
Also, P4V caches the paths it shows in the tree so after doing this it may still show up as the old name. a p4 dirs command however will show the new case.