Is there a way to back up Visual Studio Team Services projects?

Question

I advocate using Visual Studio Team Services for our version control solution and actually started to do it. However, my manager, who is somewhat worried when it comes to cloud storage and services, wants to know what our contingency plan is in case Team Services is no longer available for any reason.

I pointed out that we have the source code on the computers of our developers, in their associated workspaces, but, admittedly, if we were done with this and did not have access to Team Services, we would of course have a little bit of binding. All of them can work on different parts of the same solution, and we will not be able to check all their changes back to the central repository or merge the changes made in separate branches. We would also not have access to comments related to previous posts, or to our lag, tests, etc.

So the question is, is there a way to back up everything that we host in Team Services so that if something goes wrong, we can restore it all to a TFS installation locally (or somewhere else)?

Answer 1

I'm a little late to the party, but we developed the Team Services backup tool. We planned it as a scheduled task, and it works once a day. Then it simply clones all our repositories to disk.

Taken from this blog :

We use the VSO Rest API to request our VSO account and get all the data we need. Since you can only have one Project Project collection in VSO, we retrieve all the team projects in the collection by default. Each of these team projects can have multiple repositories that need to be backed up. A folder is created for each team project and saved to a disk location that can be configured in app.config. When a project’s command folder is created, the task iterates over each repository into a team project and creates folders for each repository.

You can also develop it on github here

Answer 2

There is no backup option.

Now, if you refer only to source control, and not to work items, type in queries, builds, test plans, or anything else that the service offers, then I suggest you port your code to git.

With git, each developer will have a full copy of the source repository, including all commit history and comments. From there, the simple task is to move the git repository to another git host (e.g. bitbucket or github) and make them the new centrally hosted git repository.

In a historical note, Visual Studio Team Services at some point suggested exporting data over a period of time. You might want to add a vote or three to this related UserVoice idea to add value to this feature at Microsoft.

Side note. The business risks when using Visual Studio Team Services will be either from Microsoft terminating the Team Team Services Visual Studio service, or because the underlying Azure infrastructure has such a catastrophic failure that your Visual Studio Team Services account will not recover. Both of them have an extremely low risk and, most likely, are lower than the risks that you will have TFS in place, in your own data center, unless, of course, your infrastructure and personnel are better than Microsoft :-)

Answer 3

Not a full VS backup in terms of service recovery. But you can get the full Zip from root down using the Code website. Right-click the root folder and select the ZIP download option. Pretty neat feature.

Answer 4

The easiest way to back up everything is to use something like a TFS integration platform to periodically fetch all your data into a local TFS solution. I installed this using the Azure VM, which we turned off when we did not actively back up, which makes it really low cost. For more information about using TFS IP with Team Services, see This: http://nakedalm.com/migration-from-tf-service-to-tf-server-with-the-tfs-integration-platform/