Backup up your pending changes (TFS)

More than once I have destroyed my data by accident. I've certainly lost more data this way than any other. Version control is great for a lot of reasons; having a backup is just one of them. But if I have changes that aren't checked in, they are at risk. When I was working with TFS for version control, I wrote this PowerShell script to back up all my changes to shelvesets. TFS has the ability to enumerate all workspaces, so it's easy: you just run it once and it will back them all up. The shelveset names begin with "ZZZ" to sort them to the end of the shelveset list. It makes sense to run this as a nightly scheduled task. The script is also interesting as an example of how to manipulate TFS from PowerShell, via the TFS APIs, instead of trying to parse textual output:

[void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client")
[void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client")

$localWorkspaceInfos = [Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client.Workstation]::Current.GetAllLocalWorkspaceInfo() | where { $_.Computer -eq $env:COMPUTERNAME }

"Found {0} workspaces to back up" -f $localWorkspaceInfos.Count | Write-Verbose

Download:

Warning: it has been a year+ since I last ran this script, and I don't have access to TFS these days to test it. I think it works, but YMMV.