Backups – Make Sure Your Cloud Provider Has Them

A few weeks ago we got a panicked call from a client needing their P6-EPPM setup internally. We were surprised to find out that they had put their Primavera P6 in the cloud. They said it was for a large project they were doing in Arizona and they had some other tools in the cloud as well.

We were even more surprised when they needed the environment turned around in 48 hours. We asked, why such a rush? Then the third surprise came...they told us they lost their entire P6-EPPM database!

It turns out that the Cloud Service Provider was not doing any backups on the P6-EPPM database. It also turned out that the P6 Cloud Hosting Company somehow deleted the P6 database. Now, this may seem hard to believe, but it is not the first horror story we have heard like this over the past few months.

Just because cloud is the trend right now does not mean all service providers are giving the same quality of services or support, particularly with Primavera tools. Not all cloud providers understand how to take care of your Primavera P6, PCM, Unifier, or OPPM systems properly. These are not a simple Word or Excel system. The skills needed are not the same.

If you want to make sure you have backups, another thing you can do is take XER or XML exports of your projects. Now this does not export all of the data you could get if you were using the P6-Loader, but it is better than nothing if your database is lost.

Make sure your service provider has backups taken daily at minimum, weekly and monthly. This is necessary because you may need a variety of backup points to restore from, depending on how you are using P6. A current client, whom we provide an ad-hoc internal P6 managed service, wanted a lightweight approach to their P6 backups for their user community of six. They bought a laptop and we setup 2 backups per day, one additional one per week, and a monthly one as well. We installed monitoring on it and voila, a really simple and inexpensive in-house solution.