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I am trying to make sense of TFS projects and figure out ways to export/backup/archive them.

Lets just consider I have an OnPremis TFS project (TFS 2015).

When I use the git-tfs tool:

  1. will it export all work-items?
  2. in what format will the exported work-items be on my hard drive? (XML, JSON, custom DB-Fromat?)

Thanks for any suggestions.

Florian Boehmak
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  • No. `git-tfs` is a source code migration tool. It only concerns itself with source code repositories. It is not a "backup" or "archival" tool. What is your actual goal here? What is the purpose of the "backups" you want to create? Are you trying to move to a different platform? – Daniel Mann Jul 04 '19 at 14:14
  • We just want to pull out all TFS data and put them into an archive (with all information included, e.g. work-items). Later we may decide to migrate it to Azure DevOps. – Florian Boehmak Jul 04 '19 at 14:18
  • You already have an archive: the tfs database. – Daniel Mann Jul 04 '19 at 14:20
  • I suppose the tfs database carries all data across multiple projects in multiple db-collections. Or is all data for one project neatly decoupled in one db-collection or database that is easy to export and I can walk away with my USB drive? (hard to imagine) – Florian Boehmak Jul 04 '19 at 14:31
  • **Why** do you want to be able to *walk away with my USB drive*? You can't export anything at the level of granularity you're looking for. So I'm trying to find out what you hope to accomplish with the data so I can give you a better answer than "Nope, can't do it". – Daniel Mann Jul 04 '19 at 15:35
  • Thanks for your patience :-) A customer wants to get rid of his On-Premise Team Foundation Server; some TFS projects have to be migrated to Azure DevOps immediatly (here I would use the [azure-devops-migration-tools](https://github.com/nkdAgility/azure-devops-migration-tools)), and some need to archived (with the option to migrate them later to DevOps). For each project, pulling all data and artifacts out TFS and into a readable text based format would give the customer a sense of peace. As far as I understand from your answers, there is no common export format for each project -besides the DB – Florian Boehmak Jul 04 '19 at 18:39

1 Answers1

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will it export all work-items?

Just like Daniel said, git-tfs is a source code migration tool. It only concerns itself with source code repositories.

You can check the scope of this git-tfs tool: Use git-tfs. There is no such command line is used for work-item.

So, this tool could not be used to export all work-items to hard drive.

in what format will the exported work-items be on my hard drive? (XML, JSON, custom DB-Fromat?)

The format of the exported work item could be diverse. It depend on which format you need.

For example, we could export work item with witadmin command-line tool in the format XML:

witadmin exportwitd /collection:http://AdventureWorksServer:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection /p:AdventureWorks /f:myworkitems.xml /n:myworkitem

This command exports the definition for myworkitem to the file, myworkitems.xml.

Check the document Export the definition of a WIT for some more details.

Besides, we could also export the work-item to the excel/csv, even we could convert it Json format, Export Visual Studio Team Services Work Items Using PowerShell.

BTW, To migrate work item on TFS to Azure Devops, you can check this thread and this thread.

Hope this helps.

Leo Liu
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