Today I came to a customer for consulting and the customer told me that there is no Backups for TFS. So right away I told him this is very important and let’s create a Backup Plan for TFS.

How To: Create TFS 2010 Backup Plan

Problem

So I’ve download TFS 2010 Power Tools, Install, Open TFS Administration Console, Click “Create Backup Plan” and Nothing happens.

So I’ve started to investigate and saw some errors in TFS Event Log, of course I saw “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” and didn’t understand the problem.

[Info   @09:02:10.541] Process finished: fileName=C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft 
Team Foundation Server 2010 Power Tools\Team Foundation Server Backup Plan\
AdminPTHelper.exe arguments= exitCode=0 in 2588 ms

[Error  @09:02:10.541] 

Exception Message: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. 

(type NullReferenceException)
Exception Stack Trace:    at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.PowerTools.Admin.Models.
PageExternalDatabasesViewModel.FillList() at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.
PowerTools.Admin.Models.

PageExternalDatabasesViewModel.PageExternalDatabasesViewModel_PropertyChanged

(Object sender, PropertyChangedEventArgs e)   
at System.ComponentModel.PropertyChangedEventHandler.Invoke(Object sender, 

PropertyChangedEventArgs e)   at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.MVVM.
NotifyPropertyChangedDispatcherObject.
SetAndRaisePropertyChanged(Boolean& propertyDataField, Boolean value, String

propertyName)   at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.PowerTools.Admin.Models.
BaseWizardViewModel.

InitializePageInputs()   at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.PowerTools.Admin.
Wizards.WizardBackupPlan.Initialize() 

So I went to try my luck with ProcMon and found the following command returning an error:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 Power Tools\Team Foundation Server Backup Plan\AdminPTHelper.exe" SharePointInspection /method:FindLocalSharepointConfigDb /tfsApps:http://172.21.11.51:17012/

Solution

So Why the “Central Administration URL” is there? after a deeper drilldown I found some DNS errors,  So I went to SharePoint Web Application Settings and change the “Central Administration URL” to DNS name instead of IP Address and everything start working.