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?

[BatesRambow2]

Hello all,

After reading through the frustrations in this thread, our team of developers took a stab at addressing some of these problems. I'd like to introduce Snapshots.  

Snapshots is a utility to backup and restore AGOL web maps and applications (storymaps, etc.). With this, you can create multiple ‘snapshots’ of the same item over time to preserve past and present versions of your maps or apps. You can then restore a snapshot with ease to your AGOL content. Never lose a story map again! Test out new features without fear of corrupting your map!

You can access Snapshots with your ArcGIS Online creds, similar to using AGO Assistant at this link https://snapshots.cartolab.com.

Currently, Snapshots is in Beta testing and only backs up maps and apps. We are looking at additional features to add in the future.

Snapshots is completely free to use, and we hope someone here will find it useful. We'd love to hear any feedback you may have!

About Snapshots

Create a snapshot:

Snapshot details after creation:

[JustMapSynch]

I have yet to fully road test this, but if it is as advertised, it will make a lot of people's lives easier.  Thank you!

[BatesRambow2]

Thanks! We will be rolling out more features in the coming weeks that should make the entire restoration workflow easier, among other things.

[Nicole_Ueberschär]

this sounds awesome! I will definitely give it a try! Thanks for the effort!

[Anonymous User]

This is critical. Enterprises need fail-over.  I am concerned when managers watch demos about EOCs using AGOL.

For example for an emergency management viewer I would love to have a complete clone of our on-prem setup on AGOL.  That way the public can hit AGOL with its bigger bandwidth and we have everything on a local Portal here.  In other words a complete clone of data, webmaps and a viewer (WAB and Dashboards) on-prem in Portal since internet will go out in a hurricane, but also have the public hit everything with a public Dashboard (with a more limited subset of layers that are seen of course) so they can see status of the community through the event, especially after the event (a hurricane, for our area). Once our connectivity is restored of course replication could resume to the cloud clone of the ecoystem.   Bates that looks interesting I'll take a look.

[JoshHabel]

This is a significant concern for my organization as well.  AGOL needs a "easy to use" single push button to download a back up or your organization or ESRI needs to have a back up on their servers and give users a restore option.  Reminds me of the old Windows PC Create a Restore Point option.  

[BillSchlatter]

Out of curiosity, have you looked into distributed collaboration?  My organization doesn't have Enterprise, so I haven't tried it out myself, but from the documentation it looks like it should let you perform the kind of Enterprise-AGOL replication you're talking about.  Distributed collaboration—ArcGIS Online Help | ArcGIS

[JoshHabel]

I haven’t. I will check this out!

[Anonymous User]

Bill I will look at that. Sounds like disconnected editing and disconnected databases. Basically replication. We need the literally one button for the entire thing. The whole server and all the config. it has to be bullet-proof. 

[SMW_GIS]

Hi Bill. First of all, thank you very much for sharing your script!! This is working very well for us. I do have a question. Once the data is downloaded and backed up on our server, is there a way to publish the web maps and apps back up to AGOL?  I see that they download as a file without an extension.  How does your organization work with these files after they're downloaded?