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Shout-out for Good Customer Service: Abstrakti

Let me give a shout-out to Abstrakti Software for a job well done and excellent customer service.

My small team recently completed a project to move all of our development work from Visual Source Safe to Git source control management. Our code base was very large, with hundreds of thousands of source files across dozens of VSS projects spanning more than 17 years of history.

Preserving the VSS History was one of the project's top priorities, and for that we looked into a handful of tools that were designed for just that purpose.


A strong early candidate was the open-source C# project Vss2Git. It was pretty good, and we had access to the source, a nice plus. But in early tests, the resulting repositories had errors. They were very rare, maybe one file in a thousand would end up in the repository with no history and no revisions other than the first one. Nothing in the limited logs it produced indicated whether there was a problem or on which files. We experimented briefly with the source, to get more information and see what we could do, but then set it aside to research other options.

Next we looked at the Castellum product from Abstrakti. The free trial version was quite limiting, but its user interface was clear and its logging feedback let us know in advance which files were having trouble. Yes, Castellum also had trouble with some files - it turns out that we had some corruptions in a dozen files in our VSS database, affecting mostly revisions prior to 2009. Vss2Git gave no hint of this, but it was easy to parse the Castellum log and identify these files, then use that knowledge and the Castellum UI to omit them from the conversion and handle them manually.

We were so impressed that we bought the Small-Business license and set to converting our files. It allowed us to do our conversions into dozens of new repositories in stages, using their Before / After feature, and by selecting sub-sets of our projects and files. All the flexibility that we needed was in Castellum.

So the tool itself was very good, definitely worth the money.

Beyond that, the customer service from Abstrakti was also very good. Any time we had questions, they replied promptly, as promised. When we found a bug in one feature, they fixed it quickly. They reassured us about our license and use of Castellum even after our conversion server went through a series of hardware issues. When we requested even more logging, they provided that as well. For example, one of our files had thousands of revisions and the product would appear to hang. But when they added more logging, it was clear that Castellum was still chugging away on that massive and oft-changed file, and it was our own history that was taking so long to parse and convert.

Thank you, Abstrakti! We are now live with Git and your software was an essential part of getting here.

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