Storing MS Word Documents

ZackJones · Post by **ZackJones** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 5:37 am

Would vault (3.15 or any version for that matter) work OK with storing MS Word Documents? I've been thinking about adding project documentation (Requirements, Design, test plans) to vault for each project that we have.

How would be the best way to do that since we develop our applications with Visual Studio and the documentation isn't part of our project. Can we use the client to pick documentation files to be added?

lbauer · Post by **lbauer** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 4:46 pm

You can add Word documents just like any other files. Vault would treat these as binary files, so you could add, checkout, edit and checkin, etc., but not merge or diff with our diff tool.

ZackJones · Post by **ZackJones** » Fri Dec 16, 2005 5:44 am

lbauer wrote:You can add Word documents just like any other files. Vault would treat these as binary files, so you could add, checkout, edit and checkin, etc., but not merge or diff with our diff tool.

I won't bee needing merge and diff capabilities so Vault will work just fine. Thanks Linda!

gmagana · Post by **gmagana** » Tue Dec 27, 2005 6:29 pm

Just to add a note about binary files:

IIRC, Every time you check in a binary file, the whole file is stored again as opposed to just the changes. This implies that large binary files with just small revisions end up taking (unexpectedly perhaps) a lot of space in Vault over time.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, it'd be really cool if this has changed in Vault since I heard this info!

dan · Post by **dan** » Tue Dec 27, 2005 9:22 pm

Actually, all files in Vault are stored in a compressed, binary format, and the differences between versions are always stored as deltas between the contents of one version to the next. I think VSS works the way you describe, where the entire binary file is stored for each version.

The only caveat is that sometimes with binary files, seemingly small changes to the file can actually cause a lot of actual changes to the binary file, so the deltas tend to be larger than they "should" be, or should seem to be. But, it does get calculated, and is smaller than the full file would be. Also, binary files often don't compress very well, so they end up being close to their actual size when stored.

gmagana · Post by **gmagana** » Wed Dec 28, 2005 9:56 am

Thank you, that's music to my ears!