Ghost Items in ArcGIS Online

[AlexanderFischer]

Hello,

As you can see in the screenshots attached, one of our team members has a ghost item in the account which we can neither delete nor access in any way. We come across this problem quite often recently. How can we solve this by ourselves?

There is another related question. This item can be seen if I click on "All My Content", but it doesn't exist in any of the folders, including the root folder. How is this possible?

The username of this account is also in the attached image.

[Anonymous User]

Hi Zeno team,

Has there been any process which causes the ghost items to appear? Is there any third party software being used in ArcGIS Online to manage content or add users?

For the username ghost item, does it allow you to re-add a new user with the same username? (Aydin.Kahriman_LGS) or does it give an error message saying the username already exists in the organization?

Best,

Luba

[ManuKaur · Accepted solution]

Hello,

Symptoms of a ghost service can include:

•  Receiving and error message when trying to delete the item and the item remains in "My Content"
•  You cannot publish an item with the same name of the ghost service due to a warning stating that this item name already exists.
• High credits for storage can be found

This happens because the service was deleted from the storage database but the item reference still exists within the organization. Ghost feature services and ghost file services must be removed from the backend by creating a ticket with technical support services. 

[pp]

Hey, did you find a solution to this problem?

We have the same problem here after an upgrade of portal. 

[Ann-SophieSølund]

Hi @pp ,
I have found the below, this might be helpful to you since your issue is on the portal:
https://support.esri.com/en-us/knowledge-base/error-unable-to-delete-member-user-name-member-must-no...

[TaylorCarnell1]

I've found that you can delete ghost items by listing the items of the owned user and calling delete on the returned item object (gis.content.get typically can't get ghost items by ID) with the ArcGIS API for Python .

from arcgis.gis import GIS

gis = GIS(username="someuser", password="secret1234")
user = gis.users.get('user_name')
items = user.items()

ghost_item_id = "123"
for item in items:
    if item.id == ghost_item_id:
        # process item..

If you don't know the ghost ID, you can print the properties in the loop first.