If you need to move your existing Project Web Access (PWA) web site to a new server, chances that you have only DB backups are pretty good. Also in situation of disaster recovery it is possible that your WSS backup just can not be taken or does not exist. Here are some basic steps that will help you restore your PWA site to a new server:

  1. Restore your DB backups to the new server
  2. Provision a new PWA site on the new server
  3. Make sure that you specify the same DB name and tables names where you restored the backup in step 1.
  4. The PWA provisioning will connect to the existing tables. Make sure that there are not other PWA sites already connected to the same tables. PWA does not support multiple instances over the same tables. I think it is some architectural restriction.
  5. Backup and restore Project Workspaces on a new server if needed using stsadm –o export/import
  6. Change existing link between Project Server and Project Workspaces:

Find the magic number

SELECT     WADMIN_CURRENT_STS_SERVER_UID

FROM         MSP_WEB_ADMIN

Use this magic number in following query:

update dbo.MSP_PROJECTS set WSTS_SERVER_UID=’98f19056-ea01-4680-9e13-609c10a83556′ where WSTS_SERVER_UID is not null

Thanks to Project Server Blog for the tips.

In a follow up post I will show you how to create PWA with Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN).