As of this year, GEO Jobe GIS Consulting recommends using Backup My Org when migrating items, users, and groups from one organization to another. While Admin Tools for ArcGIS has historically handled item and group migrations, it was not originally intended for comprehensive large-scale migrations. In fact, the original intent of the Admin Tools’ cloning workflow was to perform small transfers of items that do not require item ownership or sharing to be preserved. However, over the years, the demand for cloning has increased considerably by ArcGIS Organizations globally across every industry sector. This increasing demand to improve and provide more coverage took us to the limits of what we could feasibly perform within the scope of Admin Tools. This led us to the creation of Backup My Org, which would serve as the solution for the custom migration, backup, and recovery of an ArcGIS organization’s items, users, and groups.
Completely Reworked from the Ground Up!
Backup My Org is the result of over a year of development time from our amazing GEO Jobe products team responsible for our other products, including Admin Tools and Clean My Org! To be clear, Backup My Org cloning is NOT simply copying the cloning workflow and functionality from Admin Tools for ArcGIS to a new product. Rather, it is a completely new operation and experience designed specifically for the purposes of cloning, backing up and recovering ArcGIS content. It comes with a clean and friendly user interface to streamline every step of the migration process.
More Volume Thanks to Server-side Processing!
Originally, Admin Tools for ArcGIS, was designed for ArcGIS content as it existed before 2015. Today, ArcGIS Organizations regularly see diverse item types, larger file sizes, and other complexities. This has resulted in expectations of a solution that handles these volumes of items (representing a challenge as a client-side application). This means that all workflows are subject to the same bottlenecks as your browser, when it comes to issues related to traffic and memory. However, since Backup My Org is run server-side, all operations are able to take advantage of your systems’ hardware.
More Supported Item Types!
Over the years, ArcGIS has introduced new item types and web applications to better support the amazing maps and data being used in ArcGIS Organizations. Fortunately, Backup My Org supports the following item types for migration, backups, and restoration:
- Code Attachment
- Dashboard
- Mobile Application
- Native Application
- Native Application Installer
- Solution
- Story Maps
- Web Mapping Application
Additionally, Backup My Org will see updates that include more supported item types over time. In fact, many improvements to our products, including Backup My Org is the result of user feedback and requests.
Better Visibility of Dependencies!
As the relationships between items became more and more complex in ArcGIS, it became very difficult to visually represent those connections. Having a clear understanding of how changes in different items affect each other is very important in managing your ArcGIS. As a result, we reworked how visualization works in Backup My Org. An added advantage to using Backup My Org for the purposes of migration is that it includes a visualizer of an item’s dependencies. At a glance, the user can easily know how deep or how broad a clone will be, based on all the (selectable) dependencies that go along with it for the migration.
Rewiring Is Easier With the Restore Wizard!
During the restore process of a migration, it’s very common for URLs and source locations for data to need to be remapped from the original source to the destination. In Backup My Org, there is a dedicated Restore Wizard that will not only help you define how this content should be wired in the destination, but can also save and load this mapping to quickly rewire more items later.
As you can see, we have developed a much-improved solution to easily backup and restore items, users, and groups. Backup My Org handles your organization’s migration needs much more efficiently. If you are interested in this new solution, we recommend taking a look at our product page for Backup My Org here:
