There are a variety of reasons org admins might not want to indefinitely retain content items on the Software-As-A-Service ArcGIS Online organization - cumulative burn of storage credits figuring prominently, as well as the fact that much hosted content becomes stale over time (especially at universities, as named users are transient). What I propose is a mechanism to offload/export/archive the hosted content to a local ArcGIS Enterprise instance that would accomplish the following:
1) Ahead of time, the organizations IT/GIS support folks stand up a dedicated ArcGIS Enterpise site with adequate storage. That AGE site is then set up in a collaboration with the SaaS AGOL org.
2) In AGOL, a content owner clicks an "Archive" button on the item details page of a large hosted feature layer.
3) A new feature service is created on the ArcGIS Enteprise Site from the hosted layer in AGOL with all the data from the hosted layer.
4) In AGOL, the ItemID remains unchanged *(this is critical) but now points *by reference* to the service on the ArcGIS Enterprise "archival" server through the collaboration.
5) Finally, in AGOL, the hosted feature service is deleted, freeing up storage credits.
6) Assuming no changes to ItemIDs, the content can still be referenced from dependent Web Maps with no configuration changes.
7) Should it become desirable or necessary to move archived content BACK to SaaS AGOL, then the process above should be reversible: recreate hosted feature service, use same ItemID, remove reference link.
The situations in which this might be useful are many. Here are a few:
- A feature service outgrows the SaaS environment because it's using up lots of storage credits. But, lots of web maps reference it by ID. It could be archived to ArcGIS Enterprise, and with no disruption to the dependent Web Maps if ItemIDs are retained.
- University org adminis develop a rubric for determining "stale" content. They implement it, identifying several hundred feature services, and exporting those to ArcGIS Enterprise. Of the many services archived, three people complain, and for those special cases the admins then reverse the process to replace the reference links to the off-platform ArcGIS Enterprise site with a physical hosted feature service on ESRI's SaaS infrastructure.
- An organization decides to clone their entire AGOL organization to ArcGIS Enterprise.
Collaborations are probably not the only way this functionality could be implemented.
