What are the options for period of time tracks are kept?

[JakeJacobs]

I'm in the beta for the AGOL version of tracker and on the location tracking settings page the option for period of time the tracks are kept is set to 30 days but is greyed out. 

What will the options be for AGOL?

Currently we have an audit requirement that requires all data collected for certain inspection activities be kept for at least 5 years.  Will this be possible?

[Anonymous User]

The only option for the time being is 30 days in ArcGIS Online. The next update, which is scheduled for next week, will expose the ability in the UI to export tracks to Shapefile (which only supports date not time precision) or to CSV (with full date and time precision).

We are exploring options for longer durations. Does data older than 30 days need to be accessible via the feature layer for use in maps? Or is it really only for audit requirements and as long as you could download all it when needed that would be sufficient?

[JakeJacobs]

Currently auditors and program administrators use a web-app that is time-enabled so they can set the timeframe to, say, 4 years ago, and see just the tracks and inspections from that year as they do the audit together. 

If we have to export the tracking data, we would prefer to store it where we can serve it up via a map service to support these applications, so that would be either a different hosted service or our on-prem SDE.

Have you considered offering an archive location tracking service that would be synced daily or something?  Like an operational data store?  I can see how it is helpful to keep the current location data service as lightweight as possible, but there is also a need for accessing the historical data separately.

[JakeJacobs]

I should add that our present schema treats tracks and inspections from the current calendar year as the operational data and then we archive everything to a separate set of featureclasses at the end of the year and anything from previous years is accessed from that archive location.  It's awkward to move around that much data, especially with the tracks numbering in the millions, but it works.

Users access the current year's gps tracks throughout the entire survey year, not just in a window of 72 hours, although the frequency of access definitely goes down.  But if a question comes up about an inspection that was a month ago, the gps tracks are one method they use to resolve it from a supervisory standpoint.

Archived data is only accessed during audits and those are served by separate web apps from the operational needs.

[DanielleKulas]

I also have this question- our team of field biologists need to be able to see their survey routes throughout the whole year, thus I am currently looking at methods for archiving the location tracking data in a separate layer since there is still a 30 day limit. Have any best practices been implemented for storing archive location tracking data? Surely we aren't the only folks interested in such a thing. Thanks for any intel!