Disaster Recovery: Recover from DT Crash

Team Foundation server can be setup in dual server environment with application tier running on one machine and the data tier running on different machine. We use SQL Server as our backend and we support named instances for SQL Server in VS2008. We also recommend taking regular backups of your TFS databases. In VS2008 you can use existing WSS and SQL Reporting Services. This post is going to summarize the steps you can take to recover just the TFS part of data.

In VS 2008 unlike 2005 we just have 1 SKU for all types of install. You can install TFS on single server or dual server from 1 setup that runs on the application tier machine. In case your Data Tier machine crashes you can follow following steps to recover your environment.

Install the base OS and SQL Server as per the guidance in Install guide
Restore the backed up databases on the newly installed environment
Now you have the databases restored but we store some messages in sysmessages table in Master DB and we also have few SQL jobs which will not get created by just restoring the databases. To restore these you have couple of options
- You can run repair on Application Tier machine which will fix the Data tier
- You can run TFSDB utility which is in Tools folder for TFS. This is quicker and much faster.
  TfsDb.exe repair /server:<servername> /property: "TFS_SERVICE_ACCOUNT=<TFSServiceAC>; TFS_REPORTING_ACCOUNT=<TFSReportingAC>; LCID=1033; VSTF_AS_INSTANCE=<ASInstance>; VSTF_AS_DATABASE=TfsWarehouse;VSTF_AS_ACCOUNT="

Now your system should be ready for use. If you changed the name of the DT server while recovering the new system you will have to run TFSAdminUtil renameDT command.