Limitation with Shadow Folders?

davenovak · Post by **davenovak** » Fri Apr 27, 2007 10:32 am

Is there any kind of limitation as to how many shadow locations can be assocaited with a particular Vault folder? From what I'm seeing, a single Vault folder cannot be shadowed more than once.

Here's what's going on. Suppose I have the following folder in Vault: $/Release 6.2.0/GameDefs. Now I set up the following shadow folders:

$/Release 6.2.0/GameDefs --> C:\QA Release 6.2.0\GameDefs
$/Release 6.2.0/GameDefs --> C:\Release 6.2.0\GameDefs.

This does not seem to be working for me. Vault will only update one of the two folders.

Is this a know limitation? I am using Vault 3.5.1.

Beth · Post by **Beth** » Fri Apr 27, 2007 1:38 pm

I don't believe it has to do with the number of folders you set one area of your repository to. We ran a test here again on this both with Vault 3.5.1 and 3.5.2 and it worked in both scenarios. What if you made a change to the folder name (the second one of in that path) you put it in, such as make one of those be GameDefs1?

Also, are the folders you are setting your shadow folders to empty?

davenovak · Post by **davenovak** » Fri Apr 27, 2007 3:50 pm

I ended up deleting the non-QA folder, the shadow folder definition for that folder, and then recreated both the folder and shadow definition. Amazingly, now it works. (Note: it always worked for the QA shadow folder.)

Is there something about shadow folders that might cause them to stop working (as I'm sure these were all working before at some point)? Would any manual update and/or deletion of files in a shadow folder mess it up?

Also, could this have anything to do with the cache? I cleared cache earlier today (and now it's working).

lbauer · Post by **lbauer** » Fri Apr 27, 2007 4:06 pm

Would any manual update and/or deletion of files in a shadow folder mess it up?

It's possible, if this was a shadow folder association carried over from Vault 3.5.1.

In Vault 3.5.2, the default setting now is "Optimize" for new shadow folder associations. This setting allows for changes to the shadow folder target, and the shadow folder service doesn't attempt to synchronize the target with the repository folder.

Also the cache could get out of sync, causing Shadow Folders to fail. The shadow folder log may have some clues about the problem.

davenovak · Post by **davenovak** » Fri Apr 27, 2007 4:11 pm

When you say "Shadow Folder Log", do you mean the IIS log or some other Vault log?

lbauer · Post by **lbauer** » Fri Apr 27, 2007 4:15 pm

The Shadow Folder log. The default location is %windir%\temp\SGShadowfolder.

davenovak · Post by **davenovak** » Fri Apr 27, 2007 4:50 pm

Excellent! That log was very helpful. Is there a way to configure the location of that log file? I don't see an option for that in the Admin site.

lbauer · Post by **lbauer** » Sun Apr 29, 2007 10:04 am

You can configure the path for the shadow folder log by editing the Vault shadow folder web.config file.

This is in the Vault shadow folder directory.