About Snapshots

A snapshot captures the state of your environment at a point in time. Snapshots don’t include data that's hosted on external data sources.

Backup and Restore

Take a snapshot of your environment before people start using the system and again at suitable intervals so you can restore the environment if something goes wrong. You can export and store snapshots on your local file system or cloud storage and import them back to your system if they’re required to restore content. The snapshot file that you download is a compressed archive file (BAR file).

You can keep up to 40 snapshots online and export as many as you want to offline storage. See Export Snapshots.

Oracle Analytics Cloud automatically takes a snapshot when someone publishes changes to the semantic model and keeps the 5 most recent snapshots in case you unexpectedly need to revert to an earlier model version. The minimum interval between these automatically generated snapshots is one hour.

Note:

You can take and restore snapshots using the Console or REST API. The Snapshots page in the Console lists the snapshots that you take using the Console. See Take Snapshots and Restore Information. Snapshots that you take and register using the REST API don't display in the Snapshots page. See Manage Snapshots Using REST APIs.

Content Migration

Snapshots are also useful if you want to migrate your content to another environment. For example, you might want to :
  • Migrate content you created in a development or test environment to a production environment.
  • Migrate content you created in a different Oracle product and exported to a snapshot (BAR file).

    You can generate and migrate BAR files from several Oracle products.

    • Oracle Analytics Cloud
    • Oracle Analytics Server
    • Oracle BI Enterprise Edition

When you restore a snapshot taken from a different environment:

  • The snapshot must be taken from an environment at the same version (or earlier version) as the target environment.

    For example, if you take a snapshot of an Oracle Analytics environment that includes the May 2022 update, you can restore it on other Oracle Analytics environments that include the May 2022 update or a later update (such as July 2022). You can't restore this snapshot on an Oracle Analytics environment that includes an earlier update, such as March 2022.

  • Catalog objects that your target environment doesn’t support aren't migrated.

  • In most cases, you must upload the data associated with your datasets on the target environment.

Exclusions

There are a few items that aren't included in a snapshot:
  • Data files - XLSX, XLS, CSV, or TXT files that users upload to create datasets. You can include references to data files but not the actual files.
  • Map layers and backgrounds - Custom map layers and map backgrounds that users upload to enhance their visualizations and reports.
  • Snapshot list - The list of snapshots that you see on the Snapshot page.