How to migrate team project with history within same VSTS account?

1
votes

We need to migrate our VSTS team project. I already saw that this is an eagerly awaited feature from the Visual Studio user Voice.

However, in our case the new team project is to be in the same VSTS account. Is there a way to do this while also keeping version control change history? Keeping the change history available as part of the old team project is unfortunately not an option as we will lose access to the old team project soon after migration.

If somebody has done this before with the help of any of the below tools, then it would be great if they can share their experience:

1
migrationazure-devopstfvc
It's a bit unclear what you're about to migrate from where. And why you'd lose access to the existing project. And I'd like to know more about the source control mechanism you're using. Is it TFVC? If it Git? - jessehouwing
@jessehouwing Thanks for the response. We are going to stay within the same project collections. The version control we use is TFVC. Losing access to old team project is due to organizational reasons. - mkadan
But VSTS doesn't have project collections. So are you going to do a VSTS Migration? In that case, consider cloning the Collection and importing it into two separate accounts. that allows you to leave the repo read-only in one or both of the accounts. - jessehouwing
@jessehouwing I thought project collections and account are same when making that comment. We are going to stay within the same account. https://{same_account}.visualstudio.com/{new_project_name} - mkadan

1 Answers

3
votes

It's a bit unclear what you're about to migrate from where. And why you'd lose access to the existing project. And you have different options based on the current source control type selected.

One option which you could try is to create 2 new accounts and leave the whole old account in read-only state. That should leave the history available to everyone. You can then spin up as many new accounts as you want, using just the latest version of the sources.

Git

If it's a Git repository it's as simple as making a local clone of the whole repo, creating a new team project in VSTS and pushing the clone into its second home.

TFVC

If it's TFVC, it's much harder. I've used OpsHub in the past which works reasonably well, but in our case completely got stuck in a couple of strange merge situations. Those were probably created as part of work done back when that team project was hosted in TFS 2008, so you may be luckier than we were.

You could decide to move to Git as part of your migration. Use git-tfs to create a local git repository with all your TFVC history and then push that into a bare Git repository in your new team project. Or use the TFVC import tool. There's quite a bit of documentation on this subject.

The VSTS Sync Migrator supports a snapshot without history as far as I can tell. Which would not suit you.

VSTS Copy Project doesn't support TFVC, and is no option in this case.

An option that's missing from your list is Timely Migration, it supports TFVC to TFVC migrations among other options. I've used them a long time ago to copy data between TFS servers. Back then they were working exactly as advertised.