Restoring single projects with Project Server 2007

For those of you who have been using Project Server 2003, this may be one of the new features not too many people have talked about. Yet, it will help you a lot in your daily life as Project Server administrator. In the past - or maybe present if you're still using PS2003 in your organization - it has been painful to restore a single project that for some reason is not accessible anymore or has some other issues. Many people have tried using the "Restore Single Project Tool" but were not too happy with the results. So the quickest way to restore a project actually was to restore the entire Project Server database to a backup instance of PS2003, open and export the project to a MPP file and finally re-import it back into the productive environment. That is finally over with MOPS 2007! If you already had a closer look at the 'Server Settings' in PWA of MOPS 2007, you have probably seen the 'Database Administration' section. There you will find all you need to solve the above mentioned scenario with MOPS 2007.

On the 'Schedule Backup' site you can define how many versions per project (as well as other backup objects) you want to retain. Per default, only one version per object will be retained.
On this page you can also define whether you want MOPS 2007 to automatically backup individual objects. You can also manually backup objects on the 'Administrative Backup' site. You will find the UI pretty intuitive and straightforward, I guess.

If you need to restore an earlier version of a project, simply navigate to the 'Administrative Restore' site. Here you can first select the object type you intend to restore - Projects in our case - then mark the respective version of the project plan and finally click the 'Restore' button to initiate the restoring process. For projects plan of a normal size this operation won't take too long, so don't be surprized if you don't even see the job listed in the queue.

Feel free to leave comments with questions - hope this post is helpful.