Project not in database

Question

A project in my folder was copied for someone else to work on and somehow they remained linked meaning that when he deleted his copy it also deleted the original. Within project manager it now says the project is not found in the database. The pages are still there via windows explorer and can still be opened but not via project manager. Our IT system does have a back up but rather than restoring the whole database I was wondering if anyone can tell me which part of the database is causing this problem so we can just restore the relevant parts?

Tani_S · Answer

What you describe sounds consistent with what would happen if someone tried to just copy the raw project folder with Windows, outside of Promis.e, to a new location instead of using the built in Promis.e Project Manager to properly copy the project and all its database records. The project folder contains the raw drawing files (dgn) and a few configuration files, but is not the complete project. The database records for the project are stored in the main project database. So if you copied the project drawings folder, you end up with two separate sets of files both linked to the same single set of database records, which is a very dangerous situation. The two users can make conflicting sets of edits to the files and both affect the same set of database records. In this case, when the one user deleted their copy of the project, it deleted the single set of database records to which both projects were pointing. Now the second project still has drawings, but no database records. 
 The best case scenario would be to restore a recent backup of just this project that would have been created through the built in Promis.e Project Manager, which contain all the records for that project. If you do not have a current backup, then you could potentially try to retrieve those database records, which now may not match the drawings the second user has, by restoring the SQL database from before those records were deleted, which could disrupt other projects which may have also been in progress during that time frame. You could potentially use an SQL Manager tool outside of Promis.e to figure out which records correspond to the same Project ID number that is assigned to the desired project name from a restored copy of the SQL database and then copy all the records related to that Project ID number from every table to the corresponding tables in the existing current SQL database. Both of those last two scenarios would be unsupported actions done outside of the Promis.e structure and again, the records may not exactly match the current state of the other set of drawings.