What’s Analyze?
Analyze.exe is Visual SourceSafe’s database maintenance program. This should be run regularly (suggestions range from nightly to monthly). It can repair damaged databases as long as no users are logged on (use the -f command line option). It also has an option for deleting unused files, which will recover space taken up in the database by files and projects that have been purged (-d option). A compress option, -c, will perform some compression on the database where possible. Four levels of verbosity (-v1, -v2, -v3 and –v4) give plenty of usually cryptic information (see KBA Q152807 for explanations of many of these messages). Other options can be seen by typing ‘analyze -?’. Each time analyze is run, it requires a clean directory to store backup files. The default is the folder under the data directory called ‘backup’. If this directory isn’t empty, analyze won’t run.