Restore from old WebGISDR Backup

[Sunnywaygis]

Hi Folks, Our multi machine ArcGIS Enterprise environment includes a Portal machine, with one hosted GIS Server and Data store. We also have image server federated. We lost our Portal server earlier. I am in process of rebuilding the new portal machine from scratch and have it configured as before. Once Portal is configured, our plan is to federate GIS servers and then use webgisdr utility to restore. We do have a full backup (webgisdr) before we lost the Portal machine.

In order to check if GIS servers are functioning properly, Authentication tier was changed to GIS_SERVER from ARCGIS_Portal via Admin page. We have confirmed that all GIS servers are functioning. Once Portal is setup, will federate GIS servers and then run webgisdr. I have few questions:

- Does Change of Authentication tier to GIS_SERVER would have any negative impact during restore from webgisdr?

- We want to run only backup for Portal only as all other components (GIS Server/Data Store) are functioning OK. We have extracted Portal portion from full webgisdr backup using 7-Zip. 

- We have webgisdr backup that is pretty old, more than 12 months. Has anyone done restore from webgisdr backup that is few months old and if there any challenges they came across. 

Appreciate your feedback

Thanks

[RyanUthoff]

I probably won't be able to fully answer your question, but I can give you one piece of advice that I found out the hard way regarding Portal authentication and WebGISDR.

The Portal initial administrator account in your new environment (the very first account you create when installing Portal) MUST have the same username and password as the initial admin account in your old environment (unless you have changed the username/password of your Portal PostgreSQL DB. See below for details). Otherwise, the WebGISDR will fail.

Long explanation: Creating the initial admin account does two things.

1. Create an admin Portal account.
2. Creates an account for the underlying PostgreSQL DB that runs Portal using the same credentials as the admin Portal account.

It is important to note that these two accounts are NOT connected to each other. So if you change the initial admin Portal account, the PG account will NOT change. What matters during the WebGISDR is that the username and password of the PG DB are the same. On a side note, you can change the username and password of the PG DB account here: https://portalURL.com/portal/portaladmin/system/database 

To my knowledge, none of this information is documented anywhere (which seems pretty dangerous considering if you no longer have the credentials of the primary Portal account and/or PG account, it can render your WebGISDR backups useless). This may or may not impact the question you had about authentication. 

Regarding running a restore only for Portal, I don't believe that is possible for a WebGISDR. I believe a WebGISDR is all or nothing, meaning your server and data store will also get restored. However, there are ways to restore specific components outside of the WebGISDR. For Portal, you can use the "importSite" operation found here: https://portalURL.com/portal/portaladmin/importSite 

You mentioned you extracted the Portal backup from the WebGISDR, but I'm not sure if that backup will be compatible with the importSite operation. That's not something I have done before.

Finally, regarding your last question, theoretically, a 12 month WebGISDR backup should be perfectly fine as long as the version of ArcGIS Enterprise has stayed the same and you haven't made any architectural changes to your enterprise deployment. It's just going to be a very old backup.

[Sunnywaygis · Accepted solution]

Thanks Ryan for your detailed notes above, very helpful.

Yes, I do have portal admin account credentials so will use the same to configure Portal.

re: webgisdr backup, I will go with running full backup as there are no structural changes to the system. 

Thanks again for your help.