What's the best way to move to a new Perforce server?

Question

My home Perforce server died. I set up a new one.

The project I set it up to support died in the planning phase. The contents of the depot at that point were some prototype code and we never got to setting up a disaster recovery plan.

The dev machines still have the existing code on them. As much as possible, I'd like the change of servers to be transparent to the developers--use the same depositories and the same directories, just change the name of the server to connect to and get back to work.

What do I need to do in order to make this happen?

Answer 1

I assume you don't have access to the perforce depot files from your dead server? I assume you know that you will lose all your history.

If that's the case all you need to do is setup the new server, create a user / client with the same root clientspec path as your original clientspec was using on your dev machine and checkin all the files into perforce. Pretty simple really...

You may need to rebind is SCM binding that you may have in tools like Visual Studio but that's about it.

Answer 2

What Shane suggested will populate the depot with one person's version of the files. But if you have another user who also has a copy then you'll need a couple of extra steps.

Firstly, just set one machine up as suggested by Shane.

You now need to get the second user set up. If you are confident that the version of the code user 2 has exactly matches what you put in the new server, then just create a client spec (probably same name as used before), and then sync using the "Force" flag. This will overwrite all the files on user 2's machine, and - more importantly - ensure Perforce knows which versions you really have.

However, if you are in any doubt as to any differences in code, then do not do the initial sync from the second user's machine. Instead, set up the client spec, then use the "Reconcile offline work" option - from P4V select the workspace, then it's a right click option. Then just walk through the subsequent dialog to sort out what you need.

Finally, if you want a very quick & dirty backup system for your server, I've posted some notes on my blog here - should take you just a couple of minutes to set up.