SourceOffSite 5 OS without 8-bit character support

[jclausius]

Some operating systems do not support 8-bit characters. For instance, some Asian language based OS's will use the "high-bit" of an 8-bit character to signify the following character is part of a multi-byte character. This causes the SourceOffSite (SOS) client to generate errors when saving state information about any given folder within the VSS database.

This may be seen while the SOS client tries to save a cache, and reports an error occurred storing the file because the file contains an incorrect path, and the file path has question marks or other illegal file system characters.

You can configure SOS 5.0.2 client to NOT use extended characters, and avoid this issue.

1. Make note of ALL working folder assignments. This can be seen in the SOS 5 GUI "working folder" dashboard tab.
2. Shut down ALL instances of the SourceOffSite GUI or IDE based clients.
3. Open up the SOS client configuration file, sosclient.config, which can be found in your LOCAL Application Data directory under the SourceGear\SourceOffsite\ directory. Within this file, there is an xml element named, "use_ext_charset_name_generation." Set its value to "false" instead of "true."
4. Delete your SOS 5 cache files. Again, within your LOCAL Application Data directory, there is a SourceGear\SourceOffsite\servers\ directory. This is the location of your cache files. The servers\ or all sub-folders under servers\ must be deleted. You can also rename the folders if you wish.
5. Start the SOS 5.0.2 client. This will generate a NEW cache scheme without using extended characters.
6. Finally, reset all working folders using the data from the first step. If files are "unknown" you can use CRCs to update the file list OR re-retrieve the files.