Is There A Way To Backup Visual Studio Team Services Projects?

Question

I\'m advocating using Visual Studio Team Services for our source control solution, and have actually started doing so. However, my manager, who is somewhat apprehensive when

Answer 1

There's no out of the box backup ability.

Now, if you are only referring to source control, and not work items, pull requests, builds, test plans or anything else that the service offers, then I'd suggest you migrate your code over to git.

With git every developer will have a complete copy of the source repository, including all history and commit comments. From there, it's a simple task to push the git repository to a different git hoster (such as bitbucket or github) and make them your new centrally hosted git repository.

On a historical note, Visual Studio Team Services at one point offered a data export for a period of time. You might want to add a vote or three to this related UserVoice idea to help raise the importance of the feature with Microsoft.

Side comment: The business risks in using Visual Studio Team Services will come from either Microsoft shutting down the Visual Studio Team Services service or that the underlying Azure infrastructure has such a catastrophic failure that your Visual Studio Team Services account is unrecoverable. Both of those are extremely low risk, and very likely lower than the risks you'd have running TFS on-premises, in your own data centre, unless of course, your infrastructure and staff are better than Microsoft's :-)