Back up survey data

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2 weeks ago
jakubk
by
New Contributor

First up I'm not a spatial or arcgis person so forgive me if I use the wrong terms

I'm trying to help my organisation better use arcgis online & survey 123 to manage data they capture on remote sites so I can load it into a data lakehouse and combine it with other org data, report across different locations/surveys etc

The team goes out to a remote location for a few days and uses survey123 on tablets to collect data/photos across 100s of sites.

The surveys are uploaded/synced to AGOL

 

The data needs to be QAed in the office, but it appears the only way to do this is on the 'data' tab in the survey123 webapp or by looking @ the corresponding hosted feature in map viewer in AGOL? The changes are autosaved and theres no 'undo' function. Preference is to use the survey123 webapp to QA/fix the data as it has a better UX for it

How do I back up the survey data in such a way that I can also restore it and start the QA process again?

 

I know I can export as a filegb and then upload/publish it to AGOL but then we're stuck editing it in map viewer

How are other organisations dealing with this? It doesnt seem like a unique workflow to need to fix survey data and keep versions/history

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DougBrowning
MVP Esteemed Contributor

This is really where AGOL falls down and is not enterprise ready.  The fact it still has no built in backups of any kind blows my mind really.  They just assume nothing ever goes wrong?  I have never seen a plan for this posted anywhere by Esri.  Even one day lost is thousands of dollars for us.

Anyway ... the best I have is I use a Python script to download a backup copy every night to a GDB on the network.  Then I can at least go back to old copies and get the old data if someone deletes or changes something (I use my own relationship keys since if a user deletes and you restore your globalids are all a mess).  Once I get to about 20 GB this starts to fail so then I have to backup all but photos.  Luckily we run a 9 month field season in AGOL and then download and post to SDE at the end of each season.  Long term it would be really hard to keep backing up larger and larger datasets. 

I think you could use ArcServer and create a versioned DB and then serve that out but then it is not hosted data and it is a rather complex workflow.

Sorry but that is all I have.