EPM2007 Project Restore– Recommended Steps (OOB)

You have been diligently archiving projects following your organisational best practices. There will come a time when you will have to restore a particular project from the Archive DB, perhaps it was archived prematurely or there is an extension to the project that was earlier completed…whatever the reason might be, expect this. The steps to restore a project are very simple if you do NOT use associated SharePoint Workspaces. However, if you do, then there are some considerations…..

What steps should I follow?

1. Firstly, review the List of Archived Project (refer to best practices in earlier post regarding OOB Archiving Projects)
2. Next, restore Project from the Archive Db (via Server Settings > Administrative Restore). Remember that the Project will be restored to the Draft DB. At this point, it will not exist in the Publish or Reporting DBs.
3. Set the Project ‘Workspace Provisioning Settings’ to MANUAL (via Server Settings). Note: If you don’t do this, you will not be able to undertake steps 4 & 5 below. That is unless, you choose to create a new ‘dummy’ workspace first. But then, you have the hassle of deleting this ‘dummy’ site after remapping the correct workspace to the project.
4. Open the restored Project via Project Professional and Publish to the server.
5. Finally, for each project restored, add/map the workspace URL via Server Settings > Project Workspaces. Hopefully you will kept a record of the URLs and project names in the Archive LIST.

(click picture to enlarge)

And before you ask, yes! you need to do this manually for each project being restored.

I will be discussing the the custom Archiving Tools in the following post. For smaller deployments we could manage doing this manually, but for medium – larger deployments this may become a challenge.

Hope this helps for now!