Can you save/backup your surveys to an SD card when out of cellular data coverage?

Question

Another question; I'm in Australia and large swathes of the country have no mobile (cellular) coverage. Rather than risk the loss of field data if the tablet gets damaged, can you do an offline backup to an SD card to upload to AGOL once you return to data coverage or have wifi access?

zkovacs · Answer

Hi Dan,

You're welcome. Scratch the runtime gdb tool part of my comment above. Just discussed this in another thread, it seems that a SQLite format is being used to store unsent data, and there is no direct tool/workflow I know of at the moment to extract and re-construct the data easily. Have a look at the comments of this thread:

https://community.esri.com/message/638876-re-download-survey-from-device-after-upload-failed

DanielMcIlroy · Answer

Thanks for your help on this one too Zoltan, again, some kind of backup to external media would be handy functionality. Our main concern is the tablet getting destroyed due to sever environmental conditions that we experience in the Australian outback (heat, dust, rain) or that the tablet is severely damaged or lost without backup. if we could set up a simple script that a user could run to back up the data at the end of the day (assuming they are unable to connect to cellular data) then that could be a good solution until (if!) a native external offline backup option becomes available.

zkovacs · Answer

Physically you can, but there is no such functionality in survey123.

With a suitable app on your device, you can simply copy the ArcGIS folder to the SD card to have a backup. Although it might be tricky to find a particular survey as they are referenced by the Form ID stored in AGOL (so not with the name you gave to your survey).

There are ways to recover the data from the local runtime databases (stored locally on the device) if it comes to the worst, have a look at the runtime database tools in ArcGIS (10.3+).

https://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/10.3/tools/conversion-toolbox/copy-runtime-geodatabase-to-file-geodatabase.htm  Edit: see my further comment below.

I hope this helps.