Restoring Team Foundation Server

Question

Hi Guys,

We are thinking of moving from Subversion to Team Foundation Server for our source control requirements. The reasoning behind this being that our project teams are getting bigger and management feel more comfortable using a M'soft product rather than an open sourced solution (I know - I've tried to argue the foolishness of this statement but am not getting anywhere).

So far we've had no issues except for in the case of replicating what would happen if the foundation server box completely died and we where left with just backups. We've tried following the plan at the following link - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms404869.aspx - but its proving hellish difficult!

We're just wondering whether this is supposed to be such a pain or whether we're just really dim or something. I know with a combination of Subversion and Tortoise I could get the whole thing back up and running within a couple of hours but this is currently taking days. Anyone with any advice - it would be much appreciated!

Cheers!

Answer 1

Restoring a TFS server is a pain, you're not just dim. You might want to think about having a standby server instead (both for the app tier and data tier). It's not too painful to switch to the standby and can be done quickly. Though of course you'll still want backups just in case of anything.

Answer 2

It shouldn't be taking days. Do you have some huge WSS databases? If so, you can ignore those during an initial restore, since that's not where your core source code is at.

The most important thing is to get your App Tier and Databases back online. The easiest thing might be just to email me at foyc at cornetdesign dot com and I can help either walk you through it, or get you in touch with the right people. But I've dealt with critical restores, and it's never taken days before.

Answer 3

hi guys,

thanks for the replies. the reason we're being so slow is probably because we are being dim. we must have spent a day trying to get tfs installed onto our sql server... we downloaded SQL from MSDN where it was reported as being SQL2005 SP2 (@@version also reported this) however when i looked at the version number i realised that it wasnt (or it was some incompatible version of SP2). installing SP2 onto it eventually allowed us to install TFS

i guess the problem is probably due to our lack of experience with TFS and WSS. i appreciate the offer of help cory - you may come to regret this! however we've been told to leave it for the immediate future and just stick with subversion. we'll probably have to come back to it soon though.

thanks for the help anyway!