Archiving ArcGIS

Overview

ArcGIS is a geographic information system maintained by the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI). Because ArcGIS pages rely heavily on custom JavaScript, capturing all components needed for reliable replay in Wayback can be challenging. Given the variability across ArcGIS implementations, we strongly recommend running a test crawl and reviewing the results before proceeding. We’re not able to allocate engineering resources to troubleshoot individual ArcGIS issues at this time.

Known issues

 ⚠️ Your capture may resolve to an error in Wayback. 

For a full list of known issues for archiving various platforms please visit our Status of monitored platforms page.

On this page:

• Scoping ArcGIS seeds
• Running your crawl
• What to expect from archived ArcGIS content

Scoping ArcGIS seeds

We recommend adding the following expand scope rule for crawling ArcGIS using Archive-It:

• Expand the scope of your seed to include arcgis.com. ArcGIS often hosts data on multiple servers/hosts, thus making it hard to find and implement a simple fix. 

Running your crawl

• Crawl using Brozzler.
• Because expanding the scope can increase the amount of data captured, we also recommend running a test crawl before committing data directly to your account.
• After saving your crawl, use Wayback QA on the archived pages if you notice any missing functionality. 

You may be able to achieve a more complete capture of ArcGIS content by using manual web‑crawling software such as ArchiveWeb.page. However, because ArcGIS relies on custom JavaScript, we cannot guarantee reliable Wayback replay for any uploaded WARC files that include ArcGIS content.

What to expect from archived ArcGIS content

ArcGIS content has known capture and replay limitations. Because dynamic, user‑driven elements—such as zoomable or pannable maps—generally do not function in Wayback, ArcGIS maps may replay only as static images with no interactive features.