CODEWITHSUNDEEP
perforce
Luis
Luis

Reputation: 859

Is it possible to recover deleted shelved files in perforce?

I had some changes shelved in a change list. Looks like I've deleted those shelved files by mistake. I don't keep much hopes of recovering them but given that shelving puts the changes in the server, Is there any chance that these are still accessible somewhere?

Thank you

Upvotes: 8

Views: 12379

Answers (5)

Phillip
Phillip

Reputation: 609

I knew this was a thing, but I forgot and my coworker saved my bacon with a 15 file shelve that I accidentally deleted:

In my case, VS2019 was still opened and had all of my files in it. Going to each file and Undo-ing a few times restored the shelved version of the files. Was able to save them, and then just had to diff each file with current version to make sure only my intended changes were there.

Upvotes: 1

saforrest
saforrest

Reputation: 196

If you have simply deleted one or more of the local but the shelve still exists, you can view the state of the file as of the last shelve with

p4 print -q //depot/path/to/file@=123456

where //depot/path/to/file is the depot location and 123456 is the shelved changelist.

Note that other information I have found online suggests you can simply unshelve the specified file. This may work if the lost file was opened for 'edit', but if it is open for 'add' (as I just dealt with) then unshelving will merely die with the error "can't unshelve (already opened for add)".

Upvotes: 0

The Dark Brainer
The Dark Brainer

Reputation: 694

What worked for me is that i've had them diffed recently. So, i found them in the Perforce temp folder: C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Temp\p4v\PC101907_perforce_1666

Upvotes: 3

gaige
gaige

Reputation: 17481

Unfortunately, once you've deleted the shelved files from the repository (no longer attached to a changelist), they are no longer stored anywhere that they can be retrieved.

I just dealt with this today on a depot that I was working on with a shelved file and executed the operations out of order, deleting what I wanted to save. In my case, I have a continuous backup system and was able to recover using that.

Generally, we're moving to task streams because of things like this. One of the benefits of the new "task streams" is that they provide the short-lived aspects of shelving and rapid branching without muddying up the whole repository. Basically similar to the lightweight branching in git.

Upvotes: 4

DRH
DRH

Reputation: 8288

If you've only deleted the local files, and not the shelved change itself, you should be able to recover them by unshelving the change:

p4 unshelve -s <change>

Upvotes: 2

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