September 30 came and went, and Project Online went with it. If your organization saved its projects as MPP files and pulled an OData export before access ended, you did the most important thing you could have done.
The question now is what you are actually holding, and how to turn it back into a working project environment without losing anything along the way. I recently helped a client rebuild about 150 live projects from exactly these two ingredients, so I want to share what we learned, including the parts that are easy to get wrong.
If you are still deciding which platform to move to, my earlier post, Project Online Retirement: How to Choose What Comes Next, covers the options. This one is about the backup itself.
An MPP file is a single project schedule saved from Microsoft Project. If you saved your plans from Project Online through Project Professional, each file holds the heart of that project:
What it does not reliably hold is everything that lived at the enterprise level, around the plans:
In other words, the MPP file gives you the schedule. It doesn’t give you the system the schedule lived in.
Project Online’s OData feed is what most Power BI reports were built on. If you exported it, you have a record of your data across all your projects in one place: projects, tasks, assignments, resources, baselines, and the enterprise custom field values your MPP files may be missing. Depending on what was exported, you may also have time-phased data and timesheet detail.
The catch is that an OData export holds the published version of each project, not necessarily the latest one. On the migration I worked on, a number of plans had been updated after they were last published. The MPP file and the OData export disagreed for those projects, and both were “right.” One showed the current plan, the other showed what had last been shared.
Rate history is the other gap. A standard OData export usually holds a resource’s current rate, not the full history of dated rates behind it. If your costs depend on rates that changed over time, it is worth checking whether that history was captured anywhere else.
The two backups do different jobs, and together they are much stronger than either one alone.
That last point matters more than it sounds. On our migration, every project was compared against the original data before go-live. Most matched exactly. Where they didn’t, we could explain why, and the client could sign off with confidence instead of crossed fingers.
Every one of these came up on a real project. None of them are hard to avoid once you know to look.
If the people in your plans don’t exist in the new system yet, their assignments may come in disconnected from your resource pool. Build the resource pool first, then load the projects.
A plan can open perfectly and still be missing the job codes, cost codes, or status values your finance and reporting teams depend on. Check them, and restore them from the OData export where needed.
After a migration, a view or calculated field can point at the wrong data and still look completely normal. We saw columns quietly showing stale values that had stopped updating. Test what people actually see, not just the data underneath. That one deserves a post of its own.
As above, the export and the file can disagree for good reasons, such as work done after the last publish or rates that changed since. Decide up front which source wins for which kind of data, and write it down.
Many older plans carry macros saved inside the file. Ours had macros in about two out of every three files, including some that published the plan automatically when it was closed. Opening those files in a new environment can trigger behavior nobody expects. Check for embedded code before you start opening files in bulk.
Saving to a file can quietly change a project’s name. On our migration, parentheses in project names were saved as underscores, so a plan named “Pump Trial (Phase 2)” came back as “Pump Trial _Phase 2_.” Small, but it breaks anything that looks projects up by name.
Before planning anything, it helps to know exactly what you have. These are the questions I’d ask first:
I’d rather be straight about this: if something wasn’t exported, it may simply be gone. Timesheet detail, rate history, and data that was never published are the most common gaps.
Project sites are worth a separate check. Documents, risks, and issues lived in SharePoint, which is separate from the project data itself. Ask your Microsoft 365 administrator what is still available there before assuming either way.
Even with gaps, most organizations holding MPP files and an OData export can get back to a working project environment with their active work intact. Knowing the gaps early just means nobody is surprised later.
At Pinnacle Management Systems, we help organizations turn a Project Online backup back into a working system:
Can I restore Project Online projects from MPP files?
Yes. MPP files saved from Project Online can be loaded into Project Server Subscription Edition, and imported into other platforms such as OnePlan, Deltek Open Plan, or Oracle Primavera P6. Enterprise custom field values and resource connections usually need extra work to restore correctly.
What is the difference between an MPP backup and an OData export?
An MPP file holds one project’s schedule. An OData export holds published data across all your projects, including custom field values your MPP files may be missing. A complete recovery works best with both.
Our MPP files and OData export show different numbers. Which is right?
Often both. The OData export reflects the last published version of each project, while the MPP file may include later changes. Decide which source is authoritative for each kind of data before you rebuild.
Can we recover our timesheets?
Only if timesheet data was included in your export. Check which OData tables you saved.
How long does recovery take?
It depends on how many projects you have and how complete your backup is. A short review of what you saved is the fastest way to get a realistic answer.
If you are holding a Project Online backup and aren’t sure what to do with it, I’m happy to take a look. A short conversation usually tells us what can be restored, and what it will take.