Asana

Asana outage plan

In case of an Asana outage, we need to be prepared with backups. This is a simple task within Asana that can be performed weekly. The web developer will export all public projects, while individual users will need to export any private tasks in their 'My tasks' view.

Export 'My tasks' and public projects

With the My tasks view open, click on the down arrow next to the title. Then hover over 'Sync/Export' to open the submenu. Click on 'CSV'. This should briefly open a new tab, download the file, and close the new tab (accurate for Chrome at the time of writing). Here are screenshots of selecting the CSV export in My tasks and also a project, which looks slightly different.

Some large projects (VA Blog Content, Web development, Video) are more difficult for Asana to create the backup file. In those cases, the new tab that opens will show a message that they are preparing your backup file and you will receive an email when it is ready. This process usually takes about 5 minutes or less. Clicking the link in the email will trigger the download in the browser, at which point the file should be saved to your download folder.

 Once exported, the CSV file can be dropped into our backup viewer application to view our projects and tasks. You can find the application at: https://asana-backup-viewer.netlify.app/  or https://asana-viewer.woodslawyers.com/

Upon loading, you will be presented with a prompt to upload your backup file.

After loading our backup file, the view changes to a list of tasks within the project. This screenshot shows the Web Development project tasks from the backup file.

This web application allows viewing of backed up tasks only. Nothing is editable and no interaction with Asana is implemented. If you want to search for tasks, you can just use Ctrl+F to open the browser search tool.