Thanks for the suggestions. I think this is a pretty relevant topic because of the shift in software infrastructure. I'm not necessarily concerned with the total system wipeout. That is definitely up to ESRI to handle. And I'm not particularly concerned with errors in feature editing, either. (Although in an enterprise system we have ways to restore entire systems AND individual files if ever needed.) And I haven't yet addressed the issue of possible file corruption in ArcGIS Online where you are forced to delete and recreate a (hosted) feature service, but it's something to consider.
My primary concern at the moment comes as a result of my organization's switch to using enterprise logins, which requires migrating accounts. The content of each account needs to be transferred to a newly created account and I have written scripts to handle this. These scripts access Python modules that ESRI has created. I'm trying to account for all potential failures. What happens if an internet connection is lost while content is being moved from one user to another? What if there's a power failure during account migration? I don't appreciate that I have to just cross my fingers and hope that nothing goes wrong.
Here are a few of my observations about (hosted) feature services in particular that concern me.
- A service definition cannot be updated in ArcGIS Online. Meaning, any reconfiguring of popups, editing of features, or changing symbology/transparency/scale dependency in a feature service while in ArcGIS Online is not reflected in the service definition which essentially makes the service definition useless if anything in the service is changed.
- Web maps reference feature services based on the Item ID, a unique ID assigned by ESRI. So if a feature service is lost and needs to be replaced, all web maps that reference that feature service must also be updated regardless of whether the name changes or not. I'd like to have a way to restore that feature service and maintain the original Item ID so that it does not break the web maps that consume the service.
- I see that you can download and store all of the descriptive properties of a (hosted) feature service as a json file via the REST API, but I don't know of a way to access the geometry so that both could be combined to restore an individual feature service. (I have not tried to recreate an item based on the stored json file to see if I could even recreate the item with the same original Item ID).
I'm very curious to know if any other organizations are having these same conversations internally and how they are handling these situations. I'm also curious about whether ESRI has any plans to introduce backup capabilities that also restore the original Item ID. If we are to truly dive into ArcGIS Online, we have to have some assurances that we have the ability to restore data under any circumstance.
Heath