idea ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps in ArcGIS Online Ideas

ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

Anonymous User — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 16:00:36 GMT

As far as I can tell, the only way to back-up your hosted feature layers is to go to each one's "item details" page and click "export" and download the FGDB. What if I have 50 hosted feature layers? I have to go to each one individually and perform that work flow.

Can Esri implement a "back-up" button or a "download all" button?

For backing up web maps and apps, I don't think I have any options, at least not built in. How about some tools built in for this too?

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

LisaHuggins — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 16:39:01 GMT

Yes! We lost a lot of maps and apps recently and would love to see a backup or easy way to download all or even easy way to make sure all our app/maps have the "protect from delete" attribute checked.

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

KatyCarpenter — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 16:05:34 GMT

Yes please!

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

BrianFausel — Tue, 18 Oct 2016 21:42:38 GMT

This is an absolute necessity for my organization as well. Especially the web maps - I don't know if there is a way to back them up at all. There are crude ways to backup feature services and apps right now, but some sort of one-stop backup/restore interface would be very helpful.

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

GustAnnis — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 18:16:33 GMT

Yes, this is essential for our organization as well. Backing up each file individually becomes impractical (essentially impossible) when there are lots of files. There needs to be a way to batch backup everything at once.

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

AlexBeck — Tue, 29 May 2018 15:18:36 GMT

100% agree. Does this feature exist yet?

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

JasonSmolinski — Fri, 08 Jun 2018 21:15:30 GMT

This would be amazing for teachers who use AGO as a way to have students occasionally back up their data.

This would also be an awesome way for students to save their work. I remember in school saving CAD files, shapefiles, etc., and using them in interviews/resumes/etc.

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

JustMapSynch — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 15:44:42 GMT

Absent an ability to backup Story Maps, how do you approach making updates to the map without violating the most basic rules about testing software before it goes into production, and being able to back out of an update gone bad? Do you have suggested strategies for dodging compliance officers?

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

ScottStopyak — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 12:42:47 GMT

This is the primary reason why we don't use AGO more, though we would really like to. There's no easy way to back things up. I've written scripts that will download data from specific hosted features but that's way too cumbersome to do for all content. The API tools to do this already exist so why is there no user-friendly front end in AGO? Also, having backups/replication for cloud data seems like it would be a no-brainer for esri as it could potentially double the storage credit consumption with a simple checkbox added to Settings. Toggle on Backup. Set an interval. Done. ESRI doubles its money from existing users and potentially adds thousands of new customers who currently don't use it for lack of an easy backup solution.

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

JohnMDye — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 20:45:58 GMT

Kelly Gerrow‌ - you were asking for org admin ideas, this be a good one

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

DennisAllen — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 15:39:40 GMT

I have been searching for a good way to backup all of my data, maps, and apps in ArcGIS Online and have not yet found a good solution. This seems to be much needed functionality for any organization to move to the ArcGIS Online platform. We have started to make greater use of it at my Organization, but I am very concerned that we are not backing any of our data up. Please provide a solution to be able to create backups of all organization content. Thanks!

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

GrahamMorgan3 — Sat, 15 Sep 2018 10:30:16 GMT

Backup and recovery facilities are essential for an enterprise deployment.

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

LorenzMeyer1 — Thu, 11 Oct 2018 14:24:45 GMT

The same for Portal for ArcGIS. Pushing Portal for enterprise needs a fully working backup/restore of the content (not the configuration). I cannot tell my users to redeploy each hosted feature, this is a no go.

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

FrancisSenyah — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 12:55:11 GMT

This is definitely something we would like to see implemented.

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

DavinShokes1 — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 16:34:33 GMT

They recently blogged about manually backing up individually: Back-up data in ArcGIS Online

Unfortuntely, there was no mention of a plan to implement portal-wide backups.

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

jameshickey — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 16:39:16 GMT

So, I have been thinking about this. I think that a better business choice for ESRI would be to NOT let customers have an easy way to download their whole data set. This would make it too easy to leave if you ever wanted to. I feel like this will never be implemented. So, make a way to back it all up online. At least that way when our users accidentally delete an item or a feature we could get it back.

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

FrancisSenyah — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 13:40:43 GMT

Thanks, Yes I did come across this post..

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

JohnMDye — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 16:20:47 GMT

I disagree. The best business choice is to give your customers what they want. If you do that, they won't leave your platform. Having a way to back it all up online doesn't solve anything. The point of being able to back it up is to get it outside of the ArcGIS Online ecosystem so that if you can control where your backups are hosted.

Now, if Esri wants to have their own proprietary backup file, that would be fine with me as long as I could use that backup file to do either of the below:

Extract all of the backup contents into a directory on a system which gave me a bunch of File Geodatabases and Layer files which I could use to build local copies of the content I have an ArcGIS Online (apps excluded)
- Still an Esri proprietary format which would be a real pain to go through one-by-one and convert to an open standard, but doable with some scripting help.
- Allows me to recover a single content item easily and republish it.
  - Would be super cool if I could republish a content item and all content items which have a dependency on that item
Use that backup file to hydrate a new ArcGIS Enterprise instance. Eg. Maybe I want to go from AGOL to Portal. No problem, take a backup of AGOL and give it to Portal, Portal reads the backup and recreates all of the items, content, users, permissions, groups, etc.

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

Nicole_Ueberschär — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 08:39:34 GMT

I wish I had a backup of my storymap that I just deleted by accident 😞

Re: ArcGIS Online Back-ups - hosted feature layers and web maps/apps

Anonymous User — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 21:11:31 GMT

If you think about this even further it makes even more sense for ESRI to implement some sort of AGO archiving feature. It should be a one click button to enable archiving for AGO hosted features. Upon doing so we agree to the upgraded storage fees for the delta table generation / storage. ESRI gets to utilize more Organizational credits for the storage of these features that have archiving enable.

It would also alleviate the hurdle of moving to AGO. Right now I have production level data in AGO as a hosted feature layer, which is now totally disconnected from my on-premise environment. I'm currently writing a script to ingest the REST end point of the AGO hosted feature (passing in the token along with the service URL). This will fail though if ESRI migrates my features into a new rest End-point. It also doesn't handle relationships well (attachments are stored in a related table in AGO).

ESRI give us archiving in AGO! We want it!! We will pay you the storage fees!! I promise