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

[Anonymous User]

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?

[GrahamMorgan3]

Backup and recovery facilities are essential for an enterprise deployment.

[LorenzMeyer1]

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.

[FrancisSenyah]

This is definitely something we would like to see implemented.

[DavinShokes1]

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.

[jameshickey]

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.

[FrancisSenyah]

Thanks, Yes I did come across this post..

[JohnMDye]

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.

[Nicole_Ueberschär]

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

[Anonymous User]

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 

[RobertCarlos1]

Best idea ever!