Team Foundation Server Backups

I had always felt that the procedures to completely backup a Team Foundation Server 2010 to be a hassle. Almost every friend of mine who used TFS will just tell me to 'just backup the databases' but I always have doubts about it. After all, I am really using TFS as a development collaboration platform and not just a source/version control.

When I say backup, I would like all the Report sites, the SharePoint project portals and all TFS data to be backed-up so that I can rebuild a new server with the same settings should anything bad happened. I have been relying on database backups and full system-state backups for quite sometime but a recent incident had prompted me to look for other alternatives.

Through my research, I found the Team Foundation Server Backups tool in the Team Foundation Power Tools that provides a nice extension to the TFS Administration Console to create Backup Plans. It actually backs-up everything on a TFS server including the data on the Reporting Server and SharePoint. Due to the size of data, I had to backup my data to a shared folder on a NAS.

However, when creating a Backup Plan, the wizard kept failing at the Grant Backup Plan Permissions step of the Readiness Check with the following error:

[ Grant Backup Plan Permissions ] MSSQL Server service account does not have the required permissions to create backups on the backup path \\MyNASServer\MyTFSBackupShare

We already had all the Shared and NTFS permission set. It took me and my Infra team a day to find the solution. It turns out, we need to assign the TFS service account to the Remote Desktop Users group on the NASServer in order for it to work. After that, the back up tool manage to work successfully.

and now ... I better go test the restore... *Gulp*