Source control is the bedrock of your development effort, it contains the history of your entire project and it’s too important to trust it to VSS.  Visual Source Safe is a horrible source control system and i keeps you from being productive.

Teams using VSS love to use exclusive locks on source files, this only creates contention for files and kills the team’s productivity.  Even worse, VSS’s doesn’t support branching which makes refactoring your code doubly difficult, all your changes have to be made offline and manually merged into the “trunk,” and only is VSS insanely slow it has no concept of transactions, if a bug fix required you to change and check-in multiple files at once, there’s no way to figure out which files were checked-in together using VSS’s history feature.

SVN is a much better, free alternative to VSS, which supports many features that you expect from a modern source control system: branching  and merging and transactions and atomic commits.

If you think your project’s history is stuck in VSS, it’s not, there’s a great migration tool called vss2svn which lets you migrate your entire VSS repository along with the project history to SVN.

You’ll need to download and setup SVN server and create a repository and users for your projects first, I recommend using VisualSVN Server if you’re on Windows.  What follows is a painfully long migration, but it’s well worth it in the end.

1. Download and extract vss2svn to a hard drive which has plenty of space, as a general rule, you should have enough space to hold three copies of your VSS repository;
2. After making sure that your repository does not have any files checked out, take your VSS repository offline by disabling all access to it, then create a backup of your VSS directory; at this time, you should also delete/destroy any files/projects you do not wish to migrate to svn.
3. Run the analyze command on your VSS repository, you’ll have to run analyze several times if the analyze utility encounter errors in your repository– this is very time consuming and but an important step.
4. Now you’re ready to run the migration utility from the command prompt.   You’ll need to use the following command:  vss2svn.exe –vssdir <dir> where <dir> is the directory which contains the scrsafe.ini file.  vss2svn.exe will generate a svn dump file which you’ll later import into your svn repository;
5. finally, import the dump file generated by vss2svn by using the following command on the machien where your svn repository resides: svnadmin load /path/to/repository < dumpfile.txt