What happens to Distributed Collaboration items when restoring from WEBGISDR backup?

[HéctorMeléndez]

I would like to know how ArcGIS handles syncing items from a Distributed Collaboration between ArcGIS Online to ArcGIS Enterprise when I restore my environment using WEBGISDR. What happens to:

• Hosted Feature Layers that had been sync from Enterprise to ArcGIS Online but the latest changes are not in the WEBGISDR, will they continue to sync?
• Items that had been shared previously but aren't shared in the restored WEBGISDR, do they get removed from the destination portal?

Would I have to unshare and share all of the collaboration items to get them to sync or is it smart enough to detect changes and overwrite items when it needs to? Will I have to re-share items in the receiving portal if I had shared them with other groups?

[JonathanQuinn · Accepted solution]

I don't work too closely with collaboration, but I do focus on the DR tool. The collaboration settings are stored in the backup, so the collaboration will continue to work and layers continue to sync. If you have a service at T1 and take a backup, then make some edits to it's at T2, those edits should also sync to Online. If you restore the backup, you're back at T1 and Online should be updated to reflect the data at T1 again.

Yes, I would expect items that are not present in the host environment after restoring will be deleted from the guest.

[ThomasJones1]

Hello @HéctorMeléndez ,

If you are sharing your items as a copy once you restore portal (guest) to T1 and sync, any changes will be pushed to the hosted feature service in ArcGIS Online (host). The sync process will then add, remove or update records as necessary in the ArcGIS Online (host) hosted feature service to match the portal (guest) hosted feature service.  

Any items that were shared from portal (guest) to ArcGIS Online (host) but are not present in the portal collaboration group at the time of the syncing will be removed from ArcGIS Online. This same logic applies when sharing from ArcGIS Online to portal. 

If you are concerned about items getting removed you may want to re-share any missing items to the collaboration groups in portal and ArcGIS Online before syncing. 

Thanks!

Thomas