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?

[Anonymous User]

+10 for this!...please!

[Anonymous User]

Hello Everyone!

We've developed a work flow that will now handle this issue and I wanted to share it with everyone experiencing this problem. 

1st I wrote a script that will authenticate with AGOL and download selected service URLs. 

You’ll need Postman https://www.getpostman.com/ to generate the python code to pass in the AppID / Secret Key following the article below.

Follow this article and modify the start of the script. You’ll need to create a registered application in your AGOL cloud. Then you’ll need to pass in the application ID and stuff using the article below.

https://developers.arcgis.com/labs/rest/get-an-access-token/

Once you have the token you can pass it into your URL calls and get the data & attachments back. I use the JSON to features tool in Arcpy to create a flat file GDB with all the data and attachments. Then I truncate / append it into SDE with features that are running archiving. The SDE archiving ability gives me a rolling backup each day that I can leverage in SDE using historical transactions. 

It's a rough set up for sure and shouldn't be needed, but we can't take the risk of someone deleting things by mistake. It allows us to move forward with AGOL deployment using the deployment tool (creates hosted features in AGOL). 

If you'd like a generic copy of my python 2.7 script I'd be happy to share it. 

[JustMapSynch]

This is huge!   Assuming it works, it removes my biggest reservation in recommending AGOL for an application.  Thank you! 

I'm going to have climb a bit further up the learning curve to actually do what Brandon suggests, but would be very interested to hear if someone else were able to implement his suggestion. 

[Anonymous User]

Nice one Brandon - yes please I'd love to attempt to implement your script - are you able to share it? Thanks! Ewan

[BillSchlatter]

This is a big enough issue that my organization has dedicated a significant amount of manpower to creating a backup script to solve the issue ourselves.  At present, it runs a nightly back-up of nearly all of our AGO data, with some limitations I'd have to talk to the developers to outline.  

Last I heard, they were working on cleaning up and generalizing the code enough to make a public Github repository.  If/when that happens, I'll post a link here.  

[Muhtasima_RahamanNafee]

can any one help me out with installation process of arcgis 10.5?

[Anonymous User]

I'll work on creating a template for sharing then I'll post it to this thread. As someone who is self taught in Python, it took me about 5 hours to create the backup script just for an FYI. 

If you have a lot of experience in Python you should be able to use my shell and get it up and running in a few hours. If you don't have a lot of experience you're probably looking at a few days of dedicated time and lots of patience. 

[BillSchlatter]

I got the link to my organization's AGO backup solution today.  It's available to the public here: https://github.com/SEMCOG/Ago_Backup

Basic instructions for setting it up for a different organization are included.  

[FrancisSenyah]

This sounds great Bill, thanks for sharing.  You mention there are basic instructions for set up with a different organisation, can you specify where this can be found or is this the information provided at the Github page provided?

[BillSchlatter]

The instructions are in the readme file at the Github page, which can be read by scrolling down past the file list at the link in my previous post.