Restore ArcGIS Enterprise

If part of your ArcGIS Enterprise deployment fails, you can restore the deployment using the webgisdr utility and a backup file you previously exported. You need to be aware of the following when restoring your ArcGIS Enterprise deployment:

• Any items or services created since the last export will be lost.
• Map and tile service caches, data sources for nonhosted web services, and spatiotemporal big data store backup files are not included in the backup you created using the webgisdr utility; therefore, those must be restored separately.
• If you restore to a different machine—for example, if the machine where you had Portal for ArcGIS installed cannot be recovered and you need to restore to a new machine—your content and installation directories must be the same on the new machine. For example, if your content directory was on the C: drive on the machine that failed, you must put the content directory on the C: drive on the new machine.

When you restore a highly available ArcGIS Enterprise deployment, the webgisdr tool maintains high-availability settings for the GIS Server site and the ArcGIS Data Store relational and tile cache data stores. For the portal, the webgisdr tool unregisters the standby portal machine, restores the portal to the primary machine, and reregisters the standby machine.

You can reference the properties file you created for the ArcGIS Enterprise export if you don't need to change any settings. However, if you need to change the backup file location, want to specify a specific backup file, or need to provide different portal administrator credentials, create a new properties file.

If you created incremental backups of your deployment, you must have the last incremental and the last full backup created before that incremental backup to restore your deployment.

Follow these steps to restore your on-premises ArcGIS Enterprise deployment to the same machines from which you created the backup file (or machines in a standby deployment that uses the same Portal for ArcGIS web adaptor or load balancer URL and ArcGIS Server sites that have the same services URL as your primary deployment):

1. If you moved the backup file to a new location or you want to restore an earlier file than the most recent backup file, you need to update the SHARED_LOCATION value in the properties file.

   Legacy:

   At Portal for ArcGIS 10.4, this property was SHARED_FOLDER.

   You can edit the same properties file you used when you created your backup file, but then you must remember to change the SHARED_LOCATION value in this file back to the backup location before you create the next backup. To avoid this, you can make a copy of the properties file specific for the import operation. For the purposes of this example, a copy of the file named toimport.properties is created and altered.

   By default, the most recent backup file is restored. To restore an earlier file, specify the file name in the SHARED_LOCATION path. For example, if you want to restore backup file Sep-08-2015_17-10-44.webgissite from /usr/bus set SHARED_LOCATION = /usr/bus/Sep-08-2015_17-10-44.webgissite.

   Be sure the account that installed ArcGIS Server, Portal for ArcGIS, and ArcGIS Data Store has read access to the directory where the backup file is stored.

2. Open a command shell on the Portal for ArcGIS machine, change directories to the location of the webgisdr utility, and run the utility with the import option.

   The webgisdr utility is installed to <Portal for ArcGIS installation directory>/tools/webgisdr.

   Syntax for the webgisdr is as follows:

   webgisdr --{export | import} --file <location and name of properties file>

   In this example, the properties file (toimport.properties) was saved in the user-created directory /home/ags/arcgis/portal/propfiles.

   webgisdr --import --file /home/ags/arcgis/portal/propfiles/toimport.properties

   Note that the property file does not have to be in the same directory you saved it in when first created. If you do move it, specify the new directory location with the --file parameter.

3. If your ArcGIS Enterprise deployment includes map service or hosted tile layer caches, manually move the backup copies you made, and place the files in the original arcgiscache directory.
4. If your ArcGIS Enterprise includes a spatiotemporal big data store, use the ArcGIS Data Store restoredatastore utility to restore a backup of it.
5. If you had file-based data stored on the same machine as one of your ArcGIS Enterprise components, and that machine failed, restore your backup copies to the same path on the new machine.

   For example, if you had a folder containing file geodatabases and shapefiles on one of your ArcGIS GIS Server site's machines, and that machine failed, place the backup copy of that folder in the same directory path on the new machine. This is necessary because you registered the file location with the ArcGIS Server site. If the data location changes, the services will not be able to find the data.