Copying Files between TS Areas

I needed some clarification as to what really happens when you do a OS copy as oppose to an iwupdate.

I would like to copy files from one TS area to another using the OS copy because I would like to have the files in a different location that from where it originated from. Using an iwupdate doesn't allow for this.

If I do an OS copy to another TS area, but I do not submit these files into staging, and eventually the files are deleted after deployment from this area, does this create unnecessary copies even though they are not part of any history?

If so, I am assuming that iwfsshrink will clean up any duplicates, so if this copy process is done frequently and the iwfsshrink is done like once every couple of months is there a significant tradeoff that I need to be aware of in choosing iwupdate over and OS file copy?

Just out of curiosity the iwcp command only copies files, but does this command make duplicates that need to be cleanup by an iwfsshrink process being that you can specify a different destination path than the source path?

Thanks!
-Joy F

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nipper

Can you post a use case ?

80% of the time I hear this question, there is a complete lack of understanding of how TS works. The other 20% can be accomplished by using symbolic links (on unix) or branching and proxy.

In general you are correct, if you copy files around to different paths in different WAs, you will have (best case) a confusing system.

Now the caveat to that is if this is a temporary file, that will be deleted, you may want to make it a private file. We do that since we bundle changes into a large tar ball for deployment. THe tar file is never versioned & the directory that holds it is marked as private.

HTH

Andy

james1

> If I do an OS copy to another TS area, but I do not submit these
> files into staging, and eventually the files are deleted
> after deployment from this area, does this create
> unnecessary copies even though they are not part of any
> history?

Yes.

> is there a significant tradeoff that I need to be aware of
> in choosing iwupdate over and OS file copy?

The revision history for a file is maintained if you use iwupdate.

> I would like to copy files from one TS area to another using
> the OS copy because I would like to have the files in a
> different location that from where it originated from. Using
> an iwupdate doesn't allow for this.

One suggestion: You could iwupdate to the new workarea, and then move/rename the file in that workarea. File system moves and renames will preserve file revision history.

-- James

--
James H Koh
Interwoven Engineering

Adam Stoller

> is there a significant tradeoff that I need to be aware of
> in choosing iwupdate over and OS file copy?

The revision history for a file is maintained if you use iwupdate.

Also I believe that iwupdate preserves TeamSite extended attributes, file system copies do not - so if you're copying / moving around anything for which you wish to preserve EAs you'll need to add additional steps to your process if you're using filesystem commands to copy the assets around.

--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)

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mjs

Well, in my case, I want to create a "sandbox" branch or workarea--i.e. make a copy of an existing branch/edition that users can play around in without worrying that they'll break something.

(Don't particularly want to use "rollback" for this because it makes for a confusing version history.)

Should iwupdate be used for this? (Also, is there a way to copy entire branches (including sub-branches)?)

Migrateduser

For what you're doing a normal workarea would be sufficient as long as nothing was unintentionally submitted from it. To protect against unintentional/unwise submits, you could make a branch dedicated to experimentation. Base it on a recent edition; perhaps publishing just to split the branch off. The branch will be populated with the content of that edition.

Now if work needs to be moved from the sandbox to a WA of the real branch, 'iwupdate/'Copy to Area' is a good tool for this. Especially if used to copy from an edition on the sandbox branch so integration isn't dealing with a moving target. TS will indicate any req'd merges. And I recommend naming sanbox branches for one specific experiment. Then after each experiment is concluded, and changes merged to the development branch, delete the sandbox branch. This simplifies (by eliminating) management of divergence between the real development branch and the sanbox branch(es).

We wrote a custom command line tool called iwcopy that takes a source and target path and performs a file system copy of contents, then transfers metadata to the target file from the source. This CLT can easily be recursively called from a script to mass copy entire areas.

rajnag

Can you share "iwcopy", In TS 5.0.1 iwcp is bug. I want to copy from one workare to another workarea and there EA's.