G.A. Suite: Multiple Accounts in Backup for Performance and Scalability

Anna Shalomova

PPM Consultant

What is G.A. Suite? How to use multiple accounts in backup for performance and scalability of Microsoft Project Online?

For the companies actively using Microsoft Project Online, a backup tool is a must-have these days. We surveyed our client companies recently, and 65% of respondents said it could take up to 8 hours per project to restore and validate. Downtime costs are enormous, so regular administrative backups should become standard practice.

FluentPro Governance and Administration Suite (G.A. Suite) solution helps companies establish Office 365 Project Online practices in compliance with ITSM and provides usage and adoption analytics and governance capabilities for decision-makers and PMO. Moreover, the solution provides tools to backup/restore/archive data, manage the Microsoft Project Online configuration lifecycle, and help organizations implement governance practices for Microsoft Office 365 PPM solutions

> Read also: Archiving Information in Microsoft Project Online.

In this post, we’ll go over a case applicable to organizations with a large number of projects – when there’s too much data to backup, and these backups need to run frequently – the situation where you overload the system and get Error 429 (too many requests) or when the system speed becomes an issue.

At FluentPro, we’ve developed a SaaS service for administrative backups of Project Online configuration, data, and SharePoint content – FluentPro G.A. Suite. It performs full or partial backups (scheduled or on-demand), creates multiple backup plans, and restores when needed.

Among other things, this solution allows using multiple accounts while performing the backup. This way, all the backup-related job processes are distributed equally among all the user accounts you set for this. We recommend using 2-3 user accounts per 1000 projects. This allows you to speed up the backup process and avoids throttling and other timeout errors.

How G.A. Suite works

Backup for Project Online uses credentials set in the Connection Settings section.
To use additional accounts, check the ‘Use specific credentials’ checkbox and enter login credentials.
Click ‘+’ to add login and password or ‘x’ to remove the additional account. Then select the PWA content that you wish to create a backup of by checking the appropriate checkboxes and clicking START.

You’re now all set. When the backup starts, it will run quickly and smoothly, and the processing will be done using those multiple accounts.

Please note that specified user account(s) should be assigned to the PWA Administrators security group and Site Collection Administrators group on the PWA.

We strongly suggest using the ‘Service Account’ type of credentials created specifically for FluentPro G.A. Suite for Project Online to avoid these accounts being used simultaneously on the PWA while the backup is running.