Component-level restore from incremental .webgissite — Import Site fails

AYUSHYADAV

Overview

I am trying to restore only a single individual component (Portal for ArcGIS) from a webgisdr backup rather than restoring the entire deployment, in order to minimise downtime. I am following this Esri Technical Support article:

How To: Extract WebGISDR file for individual ArcGIS Enterprise component restoration (Article ID: 000036699)
https://support.esri.com/en-us/knowledge-base/how-to-extract-webgisdr-file-for-individual-arcgis-ente-000036699

Environment details

• ArcGIS Enterprise v11.5
• 14 machines in total, every component configured in high availability (HA):
  • 2 x Portal for ArcGIS
  • 2 x Hosting Server
  • 2 x Relational Data Store
  • 2 x Web Adaptor
  • 2 x Image Hosting Server
  • 2 x Raster Analytics Server
  • 2 x Dynamic Image Server
• Deployment has been in production since 2021

Backup configuration

• Full webgisdr backup: every Sunday
• Incremental webgisdr backup: Monday to Saturday
• Current full backup size: approx. 800 GB
• Full backup duration: approx. 12 hours
• Incremental backup duration: approx. 1 hour

Scenario

An issue occurred with Portal mid-week (Wednesday) and a restore was required. Since only Portal was affected, I followed the article above to extract and restore just the Portal component instead of running a full webgisdr --import.

What I have done so far

1. Extracted the .webgissite file from last Sunday's full backup using 7-Zip.
2. Extracted the .portalsite file from the portal folder inside the archive.
3. Restored it using the Import Site operation in the Portal Administrator Directory.
   → This worked exactly as described in the article.
4. Next, I attempted to restore the incremental Portal backup (Wednesday) on top of the restored full backup.
   → This failed with an error.

My questions

1. Step 6 of the article states to use the Import Site operation for Portal and Server to restore the extracted backups. Does the same Import Site operation apply to an incremental webgisdr backup, or is Import Site only valid for a full site export?
2. If Import Site is not the correct method, which endpoint or utility should be used to restore the Portal, Server & Datastore portion of an incremental backup at the component level?
3. If the latter, is there any recommended approach to recover component alone up to the latest incremental point without a full 12-hour deployment-wide restore?

Any guidance or experience with this would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Ayush