History of TFS Lost

Question

I ran into a problem that looked like this: TFS permanently deleted a branch and its entire history and does not allow me to interact with any sets of changes that were in this branch. Here's what happened:

• I created a new branch (A) for the existing branch (B).
• I used A for several months.
• I combined everything in back to B.
• I deleted A by right-clicking on a branch in the source control explorer and clicking the Delete button and checked the changes.
• [At this point, I did not check if A could be restored, and did not notice anything)
• 2 weeks have passed.
• Now I want to view the file merge history
• I go to the settings of the visual studio and check the box in which all deleted items are displayed.
• A is not found anywhere
• I check to see if some other branches that I deleted in the past were visible, and they are still present.

• I look in the parent directory change history and I don’t even see the change set when I deleted A.

  • I have administrator access to the TFS database, but you don’t understand the scheme well enough to look for all the “delete” change packages.
  • I tried using the API in Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client for more information, but it does not provide any entries that were made in the TFS history window.

Update

I just ran the tf destroy command on the test branch to find out what these symptoms are and the symptoms are consistent with what I'm experiencing. I suspect that this branch was destroyed, now my goal is to find out if anyone has destroyed information about who and when

Answer 1

Further research shows that a team member in another project cleaned up the script during the two-week period that the destroy command called, accidentally destroying some of our remote branches. Tip in How to find out who ran the TFS Destruction Team? showed who it was and how it happened.