Skip to main content
All CollectionsUsing PerforceGetting Started
Migrating Perforce Repositories to Assembla
Migrating Perforce Repositories to Assembla
Toshi Dávila avatar
Written by Toshi Dávila
Updated today

Before migrating your Perforce data, it is important to review your:

  • backup procedures

  • recovery procedures

Backup procedures must be performed on the source server while recovery procedures must be performed on the target server by Assembla operations team. 

Backing up your data

To migrate your Perforce data into Assembla, you must first back up your data.

To back up your data

  1. Verify the integrity of your server by running:

    p4 verify //… 

    1. It’s possible that you may want to use the -q (quiet) option with p4 verify. Using the -q option ensures that you will product output only when errors are detected. 

    2. Running p4 verify before a backup ensures the state of the archives and allows you to spot any corruption before the backups.

      Note: For large installations, p4 verify may take awhile to run. Additionally, other Perforce commands may experience impacted performance while p4 verify is running.

  2. Make a checkpoint by invoking p4d with the -jc (journal create) flag, or by using the p4 admin command:

    • Use either p4d -jc or p4 admin checkpoint

    Note: If your site is very large, this step may take awhile.

  3. Before you back up any files, check that the checkpoint was created successfully.

    • Confirm that the checkpoint was correctly written to the disk by comparing the MD5 checksum of the checkpoint with the .md5 file created by p4d -jc.

    • The checksum in the .md5 file corresponds to the checksum of the file as it existed before any compression was applied, and assumes UNIX-style line endings even if the service is hosted on Windows.
      If your checkpoint file was created with the-z compression option, you may need to decompress it and account for line ending differences.

  4. Once you’ve confirmed that the checkpoint creation was successful, back up the checkpoint file, its .md5 file, the old journal file, and your versioned files.

    • You never need to back up the db.* files. Your latest checkpoint and journal contain all the information necessary to re-create them. More significantly, a database restored from db.* files is not guaranteed to be in a state of transactional integrity. A database restored from a checkpoint is.

    • If you have used the p4 serverid command to identify your server with a server.id file, the server.id file (which exists in the server's root directory) must be backed up.

Initiating the recovery procedure

Assembla operations team completes the recovery procedure and based on the effort involved you need to pay a service fee.  To initiate the recovery procedure, please contact support team at support@assembla.com. 



Need help? Contact us at support@assembla.com. 

Did this answer your question?