How to Sync a File Geodatabase Across Multiple Office Locations

esri-geodatabase

I am planning to have a work project with multiple file geodatabases, fgdb (consisting of images, grids, feature class, etc) and these will be passed along to three regional offices and will sit on their individual file servers (all servers are linked via distributor file system). And I was told that I can set them up to sync up during the after office hours.

There will be a "parent" fgdb which is sitting in my office and the rest are "child" databases. Of course, this will bring more complex questions, but allow me to ask below questions first.

Do I need any add-on to do it?
If no, where do I set this up?
Will Symantec back up which run at night be affected or affecting this sync?
Is there a way to bring non-ESRI files into fgdb ? (eg. .xls, .dat etc)

FYI. All users, are on 9.3.1 , with ArcMap only, without other ESRI products.

Best Answer

I update our regional offices using "xxcopy /clone" on evenings and/or weekends without any trouble to date. If your distributed file system allows it, add .lock files to an exclusion list. Otherwise there are errors (harmless) during copy if any are present in the master fgdb.

Our child fgdb's are read-only to all staff. I imagine there could be trouble if the master fgdb were copied to the regions while someone was in the midst of editing or updating a feature class. That would be fixed on the next update.

If someone in the regional office has an open Arcmap session (e.g. put their machine into sleep overnight) and the data it depends on is changed significantly they will be greeted with an FDO drawing error or similar in the morning. Closing and reopening the map has been enough to fix that.

Longer term, if you have Arcinfo look into geodatabase replication.

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The arcpy.da.Walk function from ArcGIS 10.1 SP1 allows you to do this. The following script walks through a workspace, create a list of every polyline, and copies the polylines to an output workspace.

import arcpy
import os

in_workspace = r"C:\your\path"
out_workspace = r"C:\your\path2\temp.gdb\fds"

feature_classes = []
for dirpath, dirnames, filenames in arcpy.da.Walk(in_workspace, datatype="FeatureClass",type="Polyline"):
    for filename in filenames:
        feature_classes.append(os.path.join(dirpath, filename))

print feature_classes

# Loop through the "feature_classes" list and copy featureclasses to out_workspace
for fc in feature_classes:
    name = os.path.basename(fc) # Extract only the FC basename 
    arcpy.CopyFeatures_management(fc, os.path.join(out_workspace, name))

Best Answer

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