Upgrade vs. Migration: Team Project Move

This is the fifth blog post in a series about Upgrade and Migration for TFS.

A common migration scenario is one involving moving Team Projects between servers:

“I have a Team Project on one TFS server that I need to migrate to another TFS server”

This can be a challenging task, especially when migrating to TFS 2005 or TFS 2008, as Team Projects are not fully encapsulated.  As with the consolidation scenario, the best approach is to leverage the features of Team Project Collections in TFS 2010.  For this reason, the recommended first step is to upgrade any server that has Team Projects to be moved to another server.

Although TFS 2010 does not allow Team Projects to be individually moved in the way TPCs can be moved, there is a supported set of actions to split one or more Team Projects out of an existing TPC.  The TPC Split process allows a new TPC to be created that maintains full fidelity of the data as it existed in the original TPC.  To move one or more Team Projects from one TFS 2010 server to another, follow the MSDN topic to Split a Team Project Collection.

Much like the other TPC features, the TPC Split process has undergone significant testing and is fully supported.  Another advantage of using TPCs to move data is that the process operates in an offline manner involving database backups, meaning the servers to not need to be connected or accessible from a single location.  This is particularly useful when moving data between domains without a trust relationship.