Fun with MS Project

I arrived at work this morning to find an email from one of the other leads on my project saying that somehow, my MS Project plan had gotten corrupted and it was breaking the main plan when he tried to open it. So, he renamed my file to get around the issue and let's talk in the morning.

I checked my file and it was indeed corrupt. Really odd, since it worked fine yesterday when last I touched it. But now, hosed. And my only "backup" copy is on tape from last Friday. Glad I was keeping it on the network, but I do still lose a day of work.

Second time in 3 weeks that this has happened to me. I scoured Google (web and newsgroups) for most of the morning and came up empty as far as resolution and recovery. The best information I could find said that setting dependencies (at either "end") with tasks that have subtasks can cause corruption. Well, I'd been doing that. Maybe that caused it? I don't know. The only recovery tool I found only works with MS Project Server, which we're not using.

For now, that is. The other lead and I are talking about going in super-early a few days next week to try installing Project Server to see how much overhead there will be if we use it. Can we integrate with LDAP? Will it require extra system administration? If it's smooth, we may just switch to that to help alleviate these issues. We've been wanting to do it anyway, just haven't had the opportunity or availability for it. We just can't keep taking chances with the current setup - we need something reliable. I can't lose a day's work every 10 days.