It’s well known that Surround SCM is a pretty flexible and forgiving source control tool from a developer’s perspective. What is less well known is how flexible and forgiving it is for administrators.
The technical publications team here uses MadCap Flare to produce our user guides and help files. We also use Surround SCM for versioning and managing the doc review process. Since Flare is Windows-only and I’m a on a Mac, I frequently run it in VMware Fusion.
I recently had a Windows/Office/VMware issue and one of our IT guys disappeared with my laptop for awhile. Long story short, he had to set up a new VM to fix the Office issue.
After I reinstalled all my Windows programs and got back to work, I realized that I had checked out an entire project from Surround SCM to a working directory on my old VM. And I had made changes to quite a few of those files.
While I know you’re not supposed to delete/move or otherwise mess with the .MySCMServerInfo file, I decided to try an experiment. I copied the directory from my old VM (backups are a good thing) to the new VM. Stopped and restarted Surround SCM. And, voila, Surround SCM recognized the files. The check out directory also magically switched to my new VM/working directory.
While I’m not suggesting this is something you should try frequently, it certainly worked for me and my situation.
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June 22, 2009
Hello,
Just wanted to add a few things to this. I used to work for Seapine tech support (am now working in the Quality Assurance dept.).
This will also work if you want to move your working directory from one physical computer to another (not just VMs). I recently got a newer computer assigned to me by the IT department, as the old PC was about 5 years old, and just didn’t have quite enough oomph for my current duties (it ran fine, it was just fairly slow).
I was able to just copy over my working directories from the old PC to the same locations on the new PC and just keep on working.
As for those .MySCMServerInfo files – as long as they are each in the right directory, and you haven’t modified them, they should be fine. In the case where you copy an entire working directory from one drive/VM to another, each of the .MySCMServerInfo files will still be in the same directory on the new drive, so that’s fine.