View or copy old version of a project

Question

I’ve just written about project snapshots at Best practice: Keeping project snapshots .

In fact, no snapshot was taken of our project when we first went to print in 2010 (which was before I was involved in the project), but now I would like to take one. My question is: what is the best way to do this after the fact? It seems I have two options:

(Let’s say that the printed version matches the project at 5 Dec 2010 in the Project History.)

I could revert the relevant books to the 5 Dec 2010 point, import these books into the new project, and then undo the revert (by reverting to just before the revert). I could do an S/R before and after all this, but not in the middle, so that no other user is shocked by seeing the books reverted to their seven-year-old versions.

Still, this seems to have at least two issues and dangers:

• I now have two unnecessary points in the project history, that will stay there for evermore;
• In our project, it’s hard to ensure that no-one will edit while maintenance is taking place, because we have lots of users in diverse locations; if I email them, I’d have to insist on a reply from every user so that I’d know they’ve read the announcement. And because they are in a number of widely varying timezones, I also can’t pick a time of day when it’s unlikely that anyone is editing. If someone does edit, I’m concerned that there may be merge conflicts as a result of verses being changed by both me and another user.

The second possibility is based on the fact that you can view an old version of the text in one panel of the Compare Texts window. If I switch off View by Chapter, I can cut and paste whole books from this panel into a new project.

The problem is that it’s a lot of work if I need to copy multiple books.

Is there a better way?

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Answer 1

Warning, this is a very technical procedure and a familiarity with Mercurial and TortoiseHg is strongly advised

The advantage of this procedure is that it doesn’t change your project history at all and will not produce any merge conflicts.

1. Mark a project history point or do a S/R in Paratext if you have anything outstanding (otherwise it will be overwritten by this procedure).
2. Close Paratext.
3. Install TortoiseHg (if it’s not already installed).
4. Right-click on your project’s folder in Windows Explorer and click on Hg Workbench.
5. Find the correct history point in the list and right-click on it and select Update (and then click Update in the dialog that appears). This will revert your entire project back to this date.
6. Start Paratext and do a backup or just copy the wanted files. Be careful not to make a project history point or do a S/R while in this state!
7. Close Paratext.
8. Go back to TortoiseHg and right-click on the entry that is marked as “tip” (should be near the very top) and choose Update (and then click Update in the dialog that appears). This will return the project back to it’s original state.

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Comments

Is this still the recommended procedure for exporting an old version of the project? I have a project which did a NT revision, and I want to see what changes were made. Yes, I can just compare the old version with the current version, but one of the changes made was to change the type of apostrophe used for glottals, so there are a LOT of changes which are just a change in apostrophe. So I would like to export the old version, import it into a new project, change the apostrophes and THEN do the compare.

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I thought I had asked this question recently… I just now found it here (they say the memory is the first thing to go… ) :

Extract all files from a certain Rev with TortoiseHg Workbench Questions

I would like to extract all files from a Paratext project in the state they were in at a certain point in the history. I’ve opened the project in TortoiseHg Workbench, and found the Rev that I want to extract. I can Diff to Local, which basically gives me the changes, but I can see the changes better in Paratext. I’m just wondering if there is an easy way to extract (to a separate folder, so it doesn’t affect the Paratext project) all the files in that Rev.

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Answer 2

Another option would be to use Tools > Advanced > Convert Project to create a new version of the project. Then restore that project to the history point you desire and make your backup.

NOTE that this process could take a while if you have a lot of history, but it should not impact any other users.

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Comments

anon848905:

… use Tools > Advanced > Convert Project …

Is that a new feature in PT8?

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Answer 3

Convert project was added as an Advanced tool in PT7.6. If you were using PT7.5 then yes, this is a new tool in 8.0.

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