Access specific feature services in Data Store backup

[mattkramer]

I was curious if anyone knows about a way to access data within backups of a data store without needing to restore back to that version of the data. I have some staff who mistakenly deleted a large sum of data in a hosted feature service in our Enterprise that I would like to be able to restore from a backup we took, but we have other feature services that have been active between the backup and now that I don't want to lose out on. Is this even possible?

[TimoT]

Do you have machine snapshots available?

If so, restore to a previous snapshot, use Group Export to export the affected feature service as an EPK file, then revert to the current snapshot and import the EPK file.

If you have webgisdr backups, then you can achieve the same thing as above.

If you don't have any webgisdr backups, you could still take a roundabout method to achieve the same goal. You could create a new webgisdr backup, then restore a deployment with webgisdr (you can restore to a separate, isolated deployment environment), use your datastore backup on this restored deployment, then use group export.

Workflows on group export are covered in several blogs such as:

• Moving content across tiered ArcGIS Enterprise environments

If you have 11.4, it looks like you can do group export/import through the Portal UI now

• Export and import group content—Portal for ArcGIS | Documentation for ArcGIS Enterprise

Backups are very important! I recommend formalizing a workflow to recover individual items for situations exactly like this, and implementing additional backup solutions if needed.