WebGIS DR restoring subset of deployment

MikaelJ

Hey,

 

have anyone considered creating WebGIS DR backup, altering it by  unpacking it, removing obsolete sites and items, packing it up and then restoring the modified backup to brand new machines?

 

I am fully aware this is not supported or recommended.

 

Or maybe some of you managed to restore just a portion of WebGIS DR in other way?

 

Regards,

M.

TimoT

Hi @MikaelJ 

You can extract a WebGIS DR backup file (it’s essentially a structured archive) and you’ll see it contains separate folders for Portal, Server, and DataStore.

From what I can tell:

1. The Portal backup is equivalent to a Portal site export.
2. The Server backup is equivalent to an ArcGIS Server site export.
3. The DataStore backup appears to use a different mechanism than a standard ArcGIS Data Store backup (doesn't seem to be usable by Data Store's native restore tool)

Technically, you can extract the Portal and Server components and use the import site operation to restore them individually. However, I would not recommend doing this under normal circumstances.

Although the components can be restored separately, they are tightly coupled through backend configuration and federation metadata. If everything is not restored in a perfectly aligned way, you can run into issues such as misaligned server federation IDs, which may cause issues such as impacting your ability to take future WebGISDR backups. Correcting such issues often requires backend configuration changes, which can become messy and unsupported very quickly.

So while it is technically possible to extract and restore components individually, it carries significant risk, particularly in federated deployments and should only be considered in very controlled or exceptional scenarios.