TFS Backup plan not working after upgrade to TFS 2012

Question

After upgrade from TFS 2010 to TFS 2012 my TFS backup plan is not executing anymore.

After upgrade I recreated the backup plan with TFS Power Tools 2012. The plan was successfully validated and I can also take a manual full backup with the Team Foundation Administrator Console. But the periodically backups are not taken. All log files regarding backup just contain a few header information. There is no windows event log message at the time the backup should be executed.

Is there another way how I can analyze the problem beside the log files?

Marco

Answer 1

Hi Marco,

Help me better understand the issue.

How often do you have backups scheduled?

What types of backups are you taking (full, differential, transactional)?

How often do the backups succeed?

How often do they fail?  When they fail, are there any backups created?

How are you determining if the backup was successful?  Are you looking in the backup folder and seeing that some backups are missing?

I wonder if the task scheduler is not always running the jobs.  The only event log that gets created is in the event of a failure.  So you would not see an event if the job does not run.  However if you see a new log file, then clearly it runs.

One way to diagnose is to run dbgview.exe (download from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896647.aspx)

enable tracing:

reg.exe add "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\TeamFoundationServer\11.0\Admin" /v TraceLevel /t REG_DWORD /d 4 /f

reg.exe add "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\TeamFoundationServer\11.0\Admin" /v TraceLevel /t REG_DWORD /d 4 /f /reg:64

and collect the output.  Open the Task Scheduler and run the backup tasks from there. 

thanks,

Will

Answer 2

Hi Will

I've configured a nightly full schedule. The scheduled backups never creates any files on the backup folder. 

Every evening at 11 p.m. a log file is created with type "Full Backup Activity". This log file contains only header information.

I will analyze the problem with the diagnose tool you mentioned. 

Thanks.

Marco

Answer 3

I activated tracing like Will suggested and also used WinDebug. I get still no further information when I run the backup task from the Task Scheduler. The tfs log file still contains only header information, no output in WinDebug, no event log entry.

Any other suggestions?

Marco