What happens to Project Online data after retirement, and how do you back it up and export it?
Access to Project Online and its data ended on 30 September 2026, with no read-only period. Microsoft provides no whole-tenant export: its ExportProjectUserContent.ps1 script runs one user at a time, so a backup means enumerating every Project Web App site, exporting per user, and separately saving the PWA SharePoint content. If any PWA site still opens for you, export from it now.
Quick Start
- Find every Project Web App site the tenant still lists. There are usually more than anyone remembers.
- Gather the copies that already left the service: saved
.mppfiles, earlier exports and reports built on the Project data. - Where a PWA site still opens, export the schedules per user to
.mpp,.xmland.json. - Separately, save the SharePoint content sitting inside the PWA sites. The project export does not include it.
The step most plans miss is the fourth. See the SharePoint half of the problem.
Project Online is not a separate cloud product bolted on beside SharePoint. It runs on top of SharePoint Online, and every Project Web App instance is a SharePoint site collection in your tenant. That is why this retirement lands on the SharePoint administrator's desk even in organisations where IT never touched Project itself.
Microsoft Project Online retirement: what happens to my data?
Access to it ended on the retirement date. When people ask, they usually mean one of three things: is my data deleted or just locked away, what exactly counted as "my data" here, and is there anything left I can still recover.
Deleted, or locked away?
From a practical standpoint the distinction does not help you. Microsoft's published position is that the service and its data are no longer accessible after the date. Whether bytes linger on a server somewhere is not something you can act on, and there is no documented process for retrieving them once the service is gone.
It is worth being clear about why this feels surprising. Several recent Microsoft retirements have shipped with a wind-down: a read-only phase, an export window that stays open, or content moved into an archive tier you can still reach. This one announced none of those. Assuming a safety net that was never published is the most expensive mistake available here.
Retirement impact on existing projects and data
Wider than most people expected, and this is where export plans came up short. There are two distinct bodies of content, and they needed separate work.
| What it is | Where it lived | Covered by Microsoft's export script? |
|---|---|---|
| Schedules, tasks, assignments, baselines | Project Online draft and published schemas | Yes, per user |
| Timesheets, resource plans, portfolio analyses, custom fields | Project Online feature data | Yes, per user |
| Project document libraries, risks, issues, deliverables, custom lists | SharePoint site collections (the PWA sites) | Not as content. A WorkspaceItems file records data about project site items; the documents and lists themselves are not copied |
| Project Home favourites and recently viewed | Per user, in-app only | No. Microsoft's own advice was to screenshot it |
What can still be recovered
Possibly more than you think, and it is worth an hour to find out. The export tooling itself needs a running service: Microsoft's script runs per user against a live PWA site, through the Project desktop client connected to Project Online. So start by finding out which Project Web App site collections your tenant still lists, using the inventory in step 1. If any of them still open, the export steps below apply, and the documents and lists inside are the part you can copy out as ordinary SharePoint content.
Beyond that, look for copies that already left the service: .mpp files people
saved from the Project desktop client, exports made by the per-user script before the
date, and Excel or Power BI reports built on the Project reporting data. None of these is
a complete record, but together they are often most of the schedule history.
Backing up and exporting a PWA site that still opens
The rest of this page is the export itself: five steps, in the order that keeps the per-user limitation from catching you late.
Step 1: Find every Project Web App site
Do this before anything else, because it sizes the whole job. PWA sites were frequently provisioned by project managers without involving IT, so the number in a mature tenant is routinely higher than the number anyone can name from memory.
Connect to the SharePoint Online Management Shell as a SharePoint administrator, then
filter the site list on the PWAEnabled property:
Connect-SPOService -URL https://yourtenant-admin.sharepoint.com
Get-SPOSite | ?{$_.PWAEnabled -eq "Enabled"} | ft -a Url,Owner
That gives you the URL and owner of every PWA site. Keep the list: you will need it for every step that follows, and the owner column tells you who to ask about which projects still matter.
Step 2: Know what the Microsoft export tool actually is
This is the part that derails schedules, so it is worth being clear before you start.
Microsoft publishes a Project Online User Content Export and Delete script
package, and the export script inside it is
ExportProjectUserContent.ps1. It was built to answer data subject requests.
It takes one user, identified by login name or resource ID, and exports
the projects that user owned, was assigned a task in, owned an assignment in, or was
status manager for.
Plan it as an inventory exercise first: from the site list in step 1, work out who owned projects in each site, then build the run list. The alternative, discovering the per-user constraint at the last minute, is how organisations ended up exporting only the projects someone happened to remember.
Step 3: Export the schedules
Before the script will run, three prerequisites have to be true:
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| Licence | Project Online Premium or Project Online Professional, assigned to the account running the export. |
| Desktop client | The Microsoft Project desktop client, installed and connected to the Project Online instance. It is included with either licence above. |
| Permissions | Site collection administrator on the PWA site. Alternatively, in Project permission mode, the Manage Users and Groups plus Access Project Server Reporting Service permissions; in SharePoint permission mode, SharePoint administrator. |
The scripts arrive blocked, because Windows blocks scripts downloaded from the internet by default. Unblock the zip before extracting it, through Properties on the file, or you will spend the first hour debugging the wrong problem.
Then run the export per user, per site:
.\ExportProjectUserContent.ps1 -Url https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/pwa1 -LoginName user@contoso.com -OutputDirectory C:\pwa1output
For each project the user was part of you get the schedule as both .mpp and
.xml, from the draft and published schemas separately, plus JSON for the
reporting data covering tasks, assignments, resources, baselines and timephased figures.
Alongside those you get up to 27 feature-level JSON files for things like timesheets,
custom fields, calendars, lookup tables and security. The -Options parameter
narrows that down if you only want one feature area.
Check the export before you trust it
The script writes three project list files and they do not agree with each other, by
design. DraftProjectList.xml, PublishedProjectList.xml and
ReportingProjectList.xml each list projects from their own schema, so a plan
that was saved but never published appears in the draft list and in neither of the other
two. Take a count from one file and it will not match what you expected. Read all three.
If a project is missing from all three for a user you expected it under, the usual cause is that the person was not the owner, the assignee, the assignment owner or a task's status manager, so the script correctly left it out. Export it under someone who was.
Programme structures need checking from both ends. A master plan and the sub-projects inserted into it are scoped independently, so somebody attached to a sub-project and not to the programme plan gets the sub-project alone, and somebody attached only at programme level gets only that. Neither run pulls the other half in with it.
Step 4: The SharePoint half of the problem
Here is the gap most export plans leave open. The project export covers project data. It does not cover the SharePoint content living inside the PWA site collections, and on a well-used Project Online deployment that content is substantial: project document libraries, risks, issues, deliverables, custom lists and whatever else teams built into their project sites over the years.
Those are ordinary SharePoint objects in ordinary SharePoint site collections, and no amount of running the project export script will save them. Microsoft has not clearly documented what happens to that content after the retirement, so do not count on it surviving. Treat it as a separate workstream and copy anything you can still open now.
The practical approach is to inventory first and move second. Take the PWA site list from step 1, work out which sites actually hold content worth keeping, and copy those libraries and lists into a normal SharePoint site that is not going anywhere.
Report Master exports Excel reports covering the lists, libraries and storage in a site, which is a fast way to see which PWA sites are carrying real content and which are empty shells left over from an abandoned project. Clone Master then copies sites, lists and libraries to another site or another tenant, including views, fields and lookup columns, which is the mechanism for getting that content somewhere permanent.
Step 5: Decide where the work continues
Microsoft points at two destinations, and they suit different situations:
| Option | Who it suits |
|---|---|
| Project Server Subscription Edition | Organisations that want to keep the Project Web App interface and enterprise scheduling and reporting, and can run it on their own infrastructure. |
| Planner and its premium capabilities | Organisations moving to the modern cloud path. The premium tier is backed by Dataverse. |
Nothing moves into Planner Premium automatically. Planner keeps its plans in Dataverse while Project Online kept them in SharePoint, so each project is rebuilt from the exported files. Project Server will not accept the exported .mpp files back either. Neither destination can pull history out of a service that has gone, which makes your export the only record you carry across.
What you cannot get out
- Project Home favourites and recently viewed lists. The Microsoft guidance is to log in and take a screenshot, because there is no export for it.
- Anything belonging to a user nobody runs the script for. The export is scoped to the user you name, so a project owned by someone who left the organisation is only captured if you deliberately include their account.
- A working service. The .mpp files cannot go back in, so what you are building is a readable archive plus a migration into whatever comes next.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Project Online data deleted after retirement, or just locked away?
In practice the difference does not help. Microsoft's position is that the service and its data are no longer accessible after 30 September 2026, with no documented way to retrieve them. Treat what cannot be reached as lost, and export anything that still opens straight away. What can still be recovered lists where to look.
Is there a read-only period after Project Online retired?
None was published. Some Microsoft retirements offer a wind-down window and some do not, and the guidance for this one was that access ends on the date. Do not plan around a read-only period that was never announced.
Do the Project Web App SharePoint sites survive the retirement?
Microsoft has not said that they do. The documents, risks, issues and custom lists inside PWA site collections are ordinary SharePoint content the project export did not copy. If any of those sites still open in your tenant, move what you need out of them now, as a separate task from the schedules.
What changed before the retirement date?
From 1 April 2026 existing customers could no longer create new Project Online tenants, so standing up a fresh environment to consolidate into was not an option. Whatever PWA sites a tenant had then were the only ones to export from.
Can I export all Project Online projects at once?
Not with the Microsoft script. It takes a single user login name or resource ID and exports the projects that user was part of. Covering a whole PWA site means one run per project-holding user, and resource IDs differ per site for the same person, so plan a list of runs rather than one job.
Can I put the exported .mpp files back into Project Online or Project Server?
No. Microsoft documents that saving exported .mpp files back is not supported. You can open them in the Project desktop client to read and rebuild from, which makes the export an archive rather than a restore point.
Can I move Project Online data straight into Planner Premium?
Not automatically. Microsoft documents no native route into Planner with premium capabilities, and the storage underneath differs (Dataverse against SharePoint), so each project is rebuilt from the exported files.
How do I find how many Project Web App sites we actually have?
Connect to the SharePoint Online Management Shell as a SharePoint administrator and
filter Get-SPOSite on the PWAEnabled property, as in step 1.
Do it early: PWA sites were often created without IT involvement and the real number is
usually higher than expected.
Sources
- Export user data from Project Online, Microsoft Learn, for the script package, its per-user scope, prerequisites, parameters and output files.
- Microsoft Project Online is retiring: what you need to know, Microsoft Tech Community, for the retirement date, data access after it, and successor products.
If the open question is where the work continues afterwards, see the successor options compared, which sets Project Server Subscription Edition against Planner Premium. For the dated timeline and the wider SharePoint impact, see our alert on Project Online retiring on 30 September 2026.