arcgisinput folder: What is it for?

[jcarlson]

I'm doing some maintenance on our Enterprise machines, and I happened to notice that some of the directories in our ArcGIS Server machine were not clearing out automatically. This meant that the output folder was getting quite large, when it should have been dropping files older than 10 minutes.

While I was dealing with that, I noticed that the directory arcgisinput was also quite large. According to the description, this folder

Stores source files (such as maps and data) for services that you publish.

It also appears to have no cleanup mode defined, which would imply that this folder is not meant to be cleared out. But I don't really understand what these source files are doing, if anything, and can't find any good documentation that explains it in more detail.

Key question: if I remove these files, will anything be impacted?

Most of our services are hosted. The Portal machine holds all the service definition files used to publish the services, so is anything using the raw files in the input directory?

In particular, I'm thinking about a few hosted imagery tile layers we have published. The service.sd file is about as big as the corresponding directory in arcgisinput. If I tell the service to build tiles, isn't it looking at the service definition when it does that?

It just seems like keeping these files as well as the service definitions leads to unnecessary duplication and requires extra storage space.

[JenniferBorlick]

I'm not sure if we are using it right, but this is where we put our map documents from which our map services are derived. Deleting them won't mess up what's already there, but it would be difficult to recreate or edit the services without those map documents there. 

[jcarlson]

Our services are mostly "one and done", though the source projects and datasets are kept on our local network, just in case we never needed to reference them.

Are there instances when it has been useful for you to recreate/edit the service using those files?

[JenniferBorlick]

Pretty much every time we get a new server. We've been doing this since ArcIMS days, so I've used them probably about 5 times. I copy them over to the new machine and then open them and change the paths to the new server. (And do some updates while I'm in there.

[HenryLindemann]

So the only reason your arcgisinpput folder will get large is if you are copying the data and not referencing it when publishing, this happens when ArcGIS Server can not read the source data.

I would also not delete anything out of here as the content is referencing other configs in other locations.

What I would check is the following is  the data sources registered in ArcGIS Server 

if no then the service is copying the data.

so if your data is not on the server make sure you are using a domain service account for ArcGIS and that the folder is registered as a network share and that the service account has access to it

[jcarlson]

So should it be doing this for hosted services, then?

[DavidColey]

@HenryLindemann  brings up a good point that I did not address in my reply.  He is correct.  I assumed that since you were referring to 'one and done' map services that you were publishing services by reference, and not copying data.  

[jcarlson]

Ah yes, sorry about that. I simply meant that for many of our services, we don't actually make any changes to them once they are published, so I wasn't sure if the services would actually need the original source data.

[HenryLindemann]

The Hosted services are stored in the ArcGIS datastore -a black box sql solution- the folder you see there is just a reference folder that stores details on how to access the data, these services should be deleted out of Portal otherwise you might create orphaned services, if you do create orphaned services you will have to delete them out of ArcGIS Server Manager.
Kind Regards
Henry

[jcarlson]

That makes sense, and obviously following the "proper" procedure for deleting stuff is the way to go. I'm just trying to understand how this folder is actually functioning, though. If my hosted layer is in DataStore, is anything actually looking at or using these reference files/folders? It doesn't look like the files have been modified since their original publish date.