TFS 2008 Service Pack 1 - Caution with database backups!
My colleague Zayd has posted an interesting journal of a few scary hours we had when upgrading our production TFS 2008 server to service pack 1. All went well, expect that the incremental backups on TfsVersionControl database failed after the upgrade ... we made jokes like who needs the source ... at least we have the work items going forward, but within we were sweating blood. Read Zayd's journal here!
What is important to remember with TFS is that direct access to databases is not encouraged, as the schema is changing as per design. The only access to TFS must be via the TFS SDK and the published services. This obviously does not go down well with the support and maintenance experts who are responsible for backing up the data.
Perhaps a recommendation, that originates from an email I got from Martin Woodward (the father of Brian the Bunny) is to perform a full database backup before applying a service pack or hot fix, followed by the maintenance incremental backups. We did not perform a full database backup, as we simply copied the virtual machine files for safety, then upgraded ... if problem, roll-back to previous virtual machine files ... sounded simple and correct ... resulting in a few years of aging as we investigated the problem we experienced.
We live and learn ...