> I actually loved that for a small team.

That's a joke right?

VSS is by far the shittiest VCS I've had the displeasure to use, though I will confess I never had to suffer through RCS and CVS.

It's certainly the only one which managed to destroy data. 'twas a good thing I'd already used other source control systems before VSS, because that experience would definitely have made me flee from source control systems for a while (much as Java did static type systems).

We used to call it Visual Source Shredder because of how easy it was to corrupt the database.

Are you serious? I'm not even sure if Visual SourceSafe is better than "Once a week I copy all the files into a ZIP and date it" as a strategy for version management.

for one thing, zips are far less likely to destroy data than sourcesafe, which was famous for doing just that

Worst. VCS. Ever! Can't believe anyone ever loved VSS - it was constantly corrupting the repository, people would lock programs and go on vacation, just a constant struggle.

We switched to CVS and it was immediately better, followed by SVN a few years later. I still use git like a fancy subversion, just with multiple repositories :-)

Jeff Atwood had a lot of negative things to say about Visual SourceSafe back in 2006: https://blog.codinghorror.com/source-control-anything-but-so...

There's some good links there that describe the trouble VSS caused.

Lol the comments. I went through Perforce and ClearCase too.

I try to forget ClearCase.

It haunts my nightmares.

When we were migrating to git, some of the more senior engineers came up with a workflow that was described as "the best implementation of ClearCase in git that I've ever seen". It was meant as a compliment.

We used it at my first job, up until a disgruntled contractor locked every single file in our repo on the day he got fired. We couldn't do a damn thing for like a week, until we migrated to... TFS, sadly, but even that was an improvement.

I remembering checking in PDF templates into that thing and then never being able to open them ever again because VSS just randomly corrupted files.