Backing Up TFS 2010 Using PowerShell: Part 1

In a previous post I covered how to install Team Foundation Server 2010 onto a Windows Home Server. The installation was a TFS Basic Configuration installation and whilst it was geared towards Windows Home Server the concepts are the same if you are installing it on other servers / workstations. This post will cover how to backup the TFS databases. For backing up just the raw source files too check out Part 2 of this post.

Now, I am a healthily paranoid kind of guy and after installing TFS the first thing I decided to get right was a method to backup my new TFS installation to protect against data loss. I’m not going to sleep easy until I know that my source code is backed up in a solid repeatable manner. The backup tool of choice is Windows PowerShell due to the sheer power that this scripting shell provides.

Firstly its important to understand that Microsoft Team Foundation Server relies completely on Microsoft SQL Server for its data persistence. Therefore backing up TFS is just a matter of backing up the SQL Server databases in the TFS Data Tier. Usually, unless you are installing an enterprise TFS solution, the database will reside on the same server as the rest of the TFS installation. The number of databases that are created by TFS will vary depending on the number of ‘Project Collections’ you create in TFS. Therefore to avoid having to update your backup scripts each time you add or remove a collection in TFS and if your SQL Server instance is only used for TFS then its safer to just backup ALL the databases.

I strongly recommend that you read the TFS documentation on how to backup TFS and only use the information in this post as supplementary information, as backing up your data is a serious business and I’d hate for something to go wrong.

I used this excellent post from Donabel Santos as the inspiration for my PowerShell script and modified it to customise for TFS and to provide additional functionality. The SQL Server interaction is through the use of the SQL Server Management Objects (SMO) API which provides a rich collection of objects through which you can interact with your databases. PowerShell makes interacting with these objects easy.

The basic flow of the script is to connect to the SQL Server instance using the SMO objects and then loop through the collection of databases within that instance. We ignore the ‘TempDB’ database as backing up this is not required nor possible. We then backup the database to file, again using the SMO. Once all databases have been backed up to files we zip them up (using the excellent 7-Zip) and copy the zip file to a backup location. You don’t need to install the full 7-Zip package on your server as you can download a command line friendly version that just needs to be copied across to your server. The end of the script then records the success or failure of the transaction to the Event-Log.

Obviously if you were to use this script you would need to change the file paths, SQL Server Instance name, and use an Event Log Source that was relevant to your system (or just remove the Write-Eventlog call”).

clear-host
write-output "-------------------------------Script Start----------------------------------"
write-output " TFS SQL Database Backup "
write-output "------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"
 
# load modules used in this script
import-module -name C:\scripts\support\SupportModule -verbose
 
# load assemblies
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO") | Out-Null
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.SmoExtended") | Out-Null
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo") | Out-Null
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.SmoEnum") | Out-Null
 
# create a new server object, and set backup path and timestamp info (they will share same timestamp)
$server = New-Object ("Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server") "winhomesvr\SQLEXPRESS"
$timestamp = Get-Date -format yyyyMMddHHmmss
$SQLDataFolder = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\DATA"
$backupDirectory = "c:\tempcode\tfsbackups\sql\bkupdir"
$backupZipStore = "\\winhomesvr\backup2\tfsbackups\sql\Zipped\"
$backupRawDataZipStore = "\\winhomesvr\backup2\tfsbackups\sql\ZippedRAW\"
$7ZipExePath = "c:\Scripts\Support\7-Zip\7za"
$7ZipCmdLineForBkUps = $7ZipExePath + " a " + $backupZipStore + "TFSSQLBkup_" + $timestamp
                                 + ".zip " + $backupDirectory
$7ZipCmdLineForRawDataFileBkUps = $7ZipExePath + " a " + $backupRawDataZipStore
                                 + "TFSSQLBkupRAW_" + $timestamp + ".zip " + $backupDirectory
 
# display settings
write-output "Backup Directory: " $backupDirectory
write-output "Backup Zip Store: " $backupZipStore
write-output "Timestamp: " $timestamp
 
# set error action preference so errors stop and the trycatch kicks in
$erroractionpreference = "Continue"
 
try
{
    write-output "Deleting old backup files"
    remove-item -Path ($backupDirectory + "\*.*") -force
 
    # loop all databases in server, and backup each one using SQL Backup
    foreach($db in $server.Databases)
    {
        # set database name
        $dbName = $db.Name
 
        # exclude the tempdb as you can't back that one up
        if ($dbName -ne "tempdb")
        {
            write-output "Processing database: " $dbName
            $smoBackup = New-Object ("Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Backup")
            $smoBackup.Action = [Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.BackupActionType]::Database
            $smoBackup.BackupSetDescription = "Full backup of " + $dbName
            $smoBackup.BackupSetName = $dbName + " Backup"
            $smoBackup.Database = $dbName
            $smoBackup.MediaDescription = "Disk"
            $smoBackup.Devices.AddDevice(
                          $backupDirectory + "\" + $dbName + "_" + $timestamp + ".bak", "File")
            $smoBackup.Initialize = $TRUE
            $smoBackup.SqlBackup($server)
            write-output "Processed database: " $dbName
        }
    }
 
    write-output "Processed all databases, listing outputs..."
 
    #let's confirm, let's list all backup files
    $directory = Get-ChildItem $backupDirectory
 
    #list only files that end in .bak
    $backupFilesList = $directory | where {$_.extension -eq ".bak"}
    $backupFilesList | Format-Table Name, LastWriteTime
 
    write-output "Clear out old zipped file from the zip storage folder..."
    Remove-MostFiles $backupZipStore *.zip 2
 
    write-output "Zipping up the files..."
    invoke-expression $7ZipCmdLineForBkUps
 
    # write all events to the logs
    write-output "Writting SUCCESS to EventLog"
    write-eventlog -LogName "HomeNetwork" -Source "TFS Backups"
                              -EventId 1 -Message "TFS SQL BackUp Script ran"
}
catch
{
    # error occurred so lets report it
    write-output "ERROR OCCURRED" $error
 
    # write an event to the event log
    write-output "Writting FAIL to EventLog"
    write-eventlog -LogName "HomeNetwork" -Source "TFS Backups"
                              -EventId 1 -Message "TFS SQL BackUp Script failed" -EntryType Error
}
 
write-output "------------------------------------Script end------------------------------------"

Update: Since writing this post Microsoft have updated the TFS Power Tools to include a Backup Plan which enables you to schedule full backups from the TFS Admin Console. Checkout this post.