[p4] Splitting a depot

[Paul Goffin]

Big Picture Stuff:

If you're able to manage the split so that the parts of the split are
completely disjoint - that is there was NEVER any branching history between
branches, you can always remerge the split parts later if there's ever a
need.

If you can't do that, you're embarking on a one-way process.  It's not
possible to completely reconnect a split depot where there have been
integrations across the split.  So you'll always have the fracture and the
break in your revision history.

But perhaps you don't care?  What's your support/maintenance policy on early
parts of your depot?  Are there remains of dead projects in there that are
no use to anyone?  Can you obliterate branches or intermediate revisions and
still retain released product data if that's still relevant?

Little Picture Stuff:

The way I've done splits in the past is to clone the server and to
obliterate out the sub section I don't want - but beware that when
obliterating integrated files that Perforce expands the integrations by
undoing all the lazy copies first - meaning that your intermediate depot
during the obliterations can be a lot bigger than the original depot.  Make
sure you have enough disk space for this..

The later versions of Perforce (2005 on) are much faster at obliteration
than earlier versions.

Paul.


-----Original Message-----
From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com
[mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of Jamison, Shawn
Sent: 11 December 2006 16:41
To: perforce-user at perforce.com
Subject: [p4] Splitting a depot


Howdy everyone.  Hope you had a good weekend!

I have a server with close to 10 million files and the P4ROOT is just under
100 GB in size. Fully half of what is there is not needed on a day to day
basis and checkpoints, backup and DR planning can be problematic and costly
with that much data.

Does anyone have any arguments for or against splitting a large depot?

What problems or issues did you experience?
How big was the depot?
How long did it take? 


Thanks for your input!

-Shawn J>
Perforce Admin
Ciena Corp.

_______________________________________________
perforce-user mailing list  -  perforce-user at perforce.com
http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user