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Migrating from TFS to SVN
February 1st, 2011 by Eric

I’ve just spent the past few days migrating a Team Foundation Server source repository to Subversion. It took longer and was more difficult than I expected it to be.

Of course, the easy way is to just get the latest from the TFS repository and add all of the files to the new SVN repository, but change history is valuable and I didn’t want to:

lose it
be required to go back to TFS to get it

I found tfs2svn, a tool written by Kevin Colyar expressly for the purpose of migrating while preserving the change history. If you’re going to run this on a big, mature TFS repository, there are a couple of things you should know:

It’s going to take a long time.
Stuff is going to go wrong.

This is no disrespect to Kevin — that the tool is available at all is a great help. I also have to confess that I hacked the source code a bit, so there’s a possibility that some of what went wrong was my own fault.