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?

[GustAnnis]

I have tried using Snapshots over several days now and it never loads any of my data after logging in.  I just get that blue progress line thing at the top of page indicating it is working on it, but my data (apps, maps, or feature services) never load.  I am using an Enterprise login.  Could that be a factor? 

[JoshuaTanner2]

Hey Gust Annis‌.  You're correct that Enterprise is not currently supported.  Snapshots is built to only support ArcGIS Online at the moment, but Enterprise will be supported in future releases.  If your organization is interested in using Snapshots for Portal/Enterprise, feel free to reach out at the CartoLab contact page: CartoLab Home Page .  If you have an ArcGIS Online account, you can start exploring the functionality of Snapshots now.  Also, thanks for trying Snapshots and reporting the issue.  The CartoLab team will add in a custom error for Enterprise lack of support (instead of the confusing loading indicator).  Thanks!

[JosephRhodes2]

Hi NorthSouth, please pardon the delayed reply. We are CivicLens, an Esri partner with AGOL specialty designation. We call it the "ArcGIS Online Time Machine" (https://www.civiclens.com/backups). Restoration is item-by-item, similar to the Time Machine on Mac OSX -- it doesn't wind back the entire state of an org; rather, it makes prior versions of items available for restoration. This means republishing in the case of feature layers. You can also restore maps & apps through the ArcGIS Online Assistant using the JSON backups.

It's primarily protection against deletion of critical items and errant field calculations or other faulty edits.

[JesseAdams]

For those interested, we have created an application (Backup Manager for ArcGIS) that will do exactly this. Our app will backup on a regular schedule the feature services, web maps, and applications in ArcGIS Online to off site, cloud data storage (AWS S3). This will ensure that your content is protected in the event of accidental deletion, Esri outages/errors, and anything else that would affect your data! We felt backing it up off site and taking it out of ArcGIS Online completely was important to completely protect data, and the scheduler makes sure it gets done at regular intervals. Your content can be easily retrieved and restored at any time.

We have found it really useful for data editing, you can take a back up each day and have a version control system for your edited data.

Or, if you have a critical story map, back it up in case there is ever a mistake made that corrupts that application, and it can be restored with one button.

It is available on the Esri marketplace for anyone who uses ArcGIS Online, and we hope to have a free version out soon! We built this app to fit our real use cases, and know that it can help solve a lot of what is being asked for in this thread. We are continually updating this app to fit the most use cases possible, so let us know what you think!

[Anonymous User]

If you are an administrator for an organization is there a way to backup your USERS content? or only items that you personally own in the AGOL environment?

[SianDoherty1]

We almost suffered a very costly setback where a feature service used daily in tree inspections was possibly corrupted. Having the ability to easily back this up would be amazing and would make it a lot easier to restore if anything did go wrong.

[PeterKnoop]

A lot of great solutions are mentioned for backups to prevent the complete loss of data through homegrown scripts and products. It seems like there is also a common thread around restore workflows, where links to a restored item are broken, when the original item was removed from ArcGIS Online, as the restored item is assigned a new item_id.  If you're interested a possible solution for this issue, please check out this Idea: Enable user to specify item_id when creating a content item in ArcGIS Online. (If you happen to be using Enterprise, instead of Online, then you can already specify the item_id when creating an item.)