DTSX file recovery

Question

To begin with, I know very little about DTSX files and SSIS, but my boss wanted another pair of eyes looking at this problem.

Apparently there were some problems running nightly jobs. From what I've been told, the DTSX files being used had to be recovered with an undelete tool and apparently that wasn't successful. We now have some DTSX files that have xml content and some that appear to be binary files. We do use source control here, but as far as I know, this wasn't stored in source control. I will be recommending that to my boss.

So I guess I have a few questions.

1. Are all DTSX files supposed to be XML? What little I've found on the net suggests they are.

2. Is there any way to recover these files?

3. Any thoughts on what caused this?

Answer 1

DTSX files are saved as XML.

Teconstruction of partial blocks of file structure is pretty tough regardless of the format - XML or JPG.

Going forwards, I would store DTSX packages in SQL Server so they cannot even be viewed by anyone that does not have permissions to. I would also put the project into some form of backed-up source code control.

Your best bet is going to be recovery from backups if you have them.

You can Google for Recovery Services that will reconvert your DTSX binaries into XML structures.

Look into this post for deployment best practices:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1571412/what-are-ssis-packages-deployment-and-change-tracking-best-practices