Recommended Workflow for Uploading Feature Class with Attachments and Relationship Class into AGOL

[Henry]

Hi,

Attempting to bring in some data first created in an ArcGIS Enterprise environment as an Enterprise Geodatabase Feature Class into an AGOL environment and curious about the best strategy to do so.

I have the data exported into a Geodatabase on a local device, so I've exported it from the Enterprise deployment.

It's a Feature Layer with Point Geometry, ~21000 records - most with one or two photo attachments ranging from 250-500kb each.

I'd like to be able to move this into AGOL as a Hosted Feature Class but am not sure of the best strategy to do so. Create an empty feature class and append the data in Pro, saving and syncing the changes? Publish the locally stored data as a new service? But I'm not sure if the attachments will transfer okay in that case, as its based on a relationship class and table.

Anybody have any experience/words of wisdom for transitioning big data from ArcGIS Enterprise to AGOL?

[DMFACER]

We publish services with attachments from ArcGIS Pro to AGOL on a regular basis and have never had any issues with the attachments not following.  We just add the layer(s) with attachments/relationships into a Pro map, then share as a new service.  As long as everything is coming from the same FGDB it should be fine. 

As far as transitioning from Enterprise to AGOL, we hired a consultant to do that work for us.  Now that we are more familiar with the process, I think we could have done it ourselves, but it may have taken much longer.  For object data, it should be a similar process to what you just described above, create FGDB from Enterprise and share as a new layer from Pro.  We don't host any type of image data, so I'm not sure what the process would be for that.

[Henry]

Thanks for the reply, I appreciate your input. I'm glad to hear that the attachments follow with little disturbance - I'll likely be testing the workflow in a separate AGOL environment just to see how it goes. I'm encouraged to hear that someone else has moved from AGE to AGOL, as it seems like its more common to move from AGOL to AGE. But we're focused on reducing the overhead of AGE and the server management into something more manageable - which I believe AGOL fits.

We've hired a consultant as well and we're working together on coalescing all of our disparate data into something more manageable. Some of that involves copying the existing Enterprise data we want to republish into local FGDBs, appending them into our desired structure then publishing to the new AGOL environment. That's my plan, at least.

We would be hosting image attachments, and maybe a few orthophotos here and there but no gigantic tiled imagery.

[DMFACER]

Off topic from your original post, but responding to your general comments about transitioning to AGOL in your response, make sure that you have a backup plan in place for data in AGOL.  AGOL does not natively back up data, so if someone deletes objects from a layer, or deletes an entire hosted feature layer, then it is gone.  There a Python scripts available online that will back up AGOL content, or you can purchase a tool from a third-party developer.  We also heavily utilize hosted feature layer views in AGOL to manage editing permissions for our content.  

[Henry]

Thanks for the suggestion - it was definitely a concern of mine and something my consultant let me know about.

Glad to know there are some Python scripts that can do that, we'll work on setting something up in the new environment.

Appreciate the feedback!