Get Ready For That “Big Move” With Advice From Our Experts!
Migrating content from one ArcGIS Organization to another can seem like a monumental task. At GEO Jobe, we understand the complexities involved, and that’s why we’ve developed best practices to guide you through a smooth and successful cloning and restoration process.
This guide will provide the valuable insights from our support technicians, application developers, and Enterprise team, ensuring the most stable and efficient migration possible.
The Importance of Preparation: Clean Up and Supporting Content
Before embarking on any cloning operation, a thorough cleanup of your existing ArcGIS Organization is crucial. We highly recommend utilizing our tool, Clean My Org, to streamline this process. Over time, organizations can accumulate broken links, outdated data, and unused content. Such issues can hinder successful cloning and unnecessarily consume space. Think of it like holding a yard sale before a big move to another city. After all, you wouldn’t want to pack up and travel with broken items, unknown parts in your garage, or random equipment that you haven’t thought about or needed in years!
Beyond cleaning, consider your organization’s “supporting content” – items that are not directly cloned by Backup My Org but are essential for your new environment. This includes:
- Geodatabases: Create these in your new environment and migrate all necessary data.
- ArcMap Maps and ArcGIS Pro Products: Manually transfer these files to support service publication.
- Map and Feature Services (for Enterprise migrations): Non-hosted services need to be republished in the target Organization. This ensures they correctly access their underlying data sources. You might need to publish these from .mxds or ArcGIS Pro projects, carefully pointing them to the new environment’s resources.
Setting up any necessary Custom Roles in your destination ArcGIS Organization beforehand will also significantly simplify the rewiring of user roles later on.
Leveraging Backup My Org for a Phased Migration
Backup My Org is your powerful ally in cloning ArcGIS Organizations. While a full “all-in-one” clone is technically possible, we strongly advocate for a phased approach. Breaking down the migration into smaller, manageable steps fosters greater stability, simplifies post-cloning rewiring, and enhances error management.
After the cloning process, a crucial “post-processing” step allows you to review and adjust URLs, Esri IDs, and other elements that Backup My Org couldn’t automatically rewire. This is where you can customize and update references within your target Organization.
We recommend cloning content in the following order to ensure the highest rate of success:
- Cloning Users: Begin by migrating your users. Backup My Org checks for existing usernames, allowing you to either create new users or overwrite existing ones with source Organization data.
- Cloning Groups: Once users are in place, clone your groups. At this stage, no special considerations are typically needed.
- Cloning Items in Batches: Based on variables such as network speed and system specifications, we recommend cloning in groups of about 50 items at a time, then adjust to the most appropriate volume from there:
- Data Files (CSVs, Shapefiles, etc.)
- Services (Map, Feature, Tile, etc. – Note: Backup My Org only clones Map Services if the service definition is attached. Otherwise, refer to the “Publish Map and Feature Services” step.)
- Other Map Layers
- Web Maps and Web Scenes
- Apps
It’s important to remember that not all item types are currently supported for cloning in Backup My Org. You can review the list of unsupported item types here.
Restore Clone Planning and Testing
For meticulous restore clone planning, Backup My Org offers a valuable “Export Restore Planning CSV” feature within the Backup Logs. This spreadsheet contains critical columns like “Content Type,” “ID,” “Title,” “Backup Status,” “Restore Step,” and “Testing Status.”
Key tips for utilizing this template:
- Freeze Column Headers: Lock the first row in your spreadsheet editor for easy navigation.
- Break Down Restores with Substeps: For more than 50 items of a given content type, use the “Restore Substep” column to split the collection into smaller, more manageable chunks (ideally 50 items per substep).
- Post-processing Rewire: Use the “Restore ID” and “Restore URL” columns to find corresponding items and update references between your source and destination organizations.
- Record Testing Errors: Document any errors found during manual testing in the “Testing Errors” column.
Finally, thorough testing is paramount. After the migration, rigorously test your content in the new environment to confirm everything is working as expected.
By following these best practices, you can ensure a streamlined, stable, and successful cloning and restoration of your ArcGIS Organization with the help of GEO Jobe’s Backup My Org.
If you’re looking to migrate your ArcGIS data, and are interested in our services and solutions, please reach out to us at connect@geo-jobe.com or visit our Backup My Org product page on our website.
About Our Company
GEO Jobe is a leading GIS software and geospatial solutions provider, serving more than 12,000 organizations globally. The company is most known for developing some of the industry’s most popular applications, including Admin Tools for ArcGIS, Backup My Org, Clean My Org, Manage My Attachments, and Symphony for ArcGIS.
GEO Jobe offers U.S.-based 24/7 Support for organizations using Esri’s ArcGIS© System. GEO Jobe also offers professional services focused on Esri’s ArcGIS System, including custom software development, enterprise solution implementation, data science and UAV data collection.
Founded in 1999, GEO Jobe has been in operation for more than 25 years and an Esri business partner since 2002, and is currently a Platinum Partner.
