What is a good alternative for SourceSafe on a USB Drive?

Question

I like to keep my source files on a USB drive for the portability. To date I have been using Visual SourceSafe for this purpose. What is a good alternative to VSS that fulfils these criteria:

• Entire database can be held on a USB "pen" drive
• Code / documentation duplicated on local drives
• Does not require a central server
• Easy to backup and restore using standard backup tools
• Integrates with Visual Studio
• Has a small footprint
• Easy to clean the database and keep small
• Compatible with Windows XP, Vista and Vista x64

A good reference on setup would be good too.

UPDATE

I went with Subversion in the end (TortoiseSVN). It has been pretty robust so far so I would recommend it for people with the same problem.

Answer 1

Don't use SourceSafe. There's major problems with it. See this:

• Article1
• Article2

I'd recommend using SubVersion instead.

If you're using Windows, you can use TortoiseSVN.

If you're working on Linux or other Unix variants, try RapidSVN.

Answer 2

There are two common free front-ends Ankhsvn integrates into visual studio and TortoiseSVN integrates with explorer ( my preference). There is also sliksvn a self contained svn server for windows.

Answer 3

I would use SVN (Subversion).

You can use SVN in "file" mode (w/o using the network). combine this with tortoiseSVN, which integrates to explorer, and you have a nice little portable repository.

For Visual Studio integration, there is the commercial($49) VisualSVN (which I believe is the setup used to develop StackOverflow).

Someone also mentioned AnkhSVN which I haven't used, but some people find it less than satisfying.

Answer 4

Use Subversion. The FSFS style repository will work best as older BDB ones can have issues when moved from computer to computer. With AnkhSVN you'll have full integration with Visual Studio (AnkhSVN 2.x is a source control plugin; older versions still do the job, though).

Answer 5

I'd recommend SubVersion as well - you can find a hosting provider who offers SVN for really cheap, this way your source code is always backed up and available, all you need to keep on your flash drive is SVN client...

Answer 6

Bazaar does what you're asking for (in terms of working very well standalone), and there was a 2007 Summer of Code project to build a Visual Studio integration plugin which appears to have produced an at-least-partially-functional product.

Bazaar (and other distributed tools, such as Git, Mercurial, Darcs and the like) are ideal because you can have your repository stored in multiple places (ie. on your pen drive, but also copied up to a server on a regular basis), make changes in one or the other branch (let's say you leave your pen drive at home -- you can build changes against the copy on a remote server, upload them via WebDAV, SFTP, etc, and be able to seamlessly merge them into changes done locally to the pen drive; non-distributed solutions such as Subversion don't have that capability).