How can one export an attachment enabled feature service from ArcGIS Online and maintain it's integrity, meaning: get the geometry, table values, attachments, and the relationship class which connects them?
The route of "Open in desktop" > select layer > Data > Export only saves the geometry and table values. Ditto for Feature Class to Feature Class tool.
Here is the solution I found, I don't know if it's the best (it would be nice to capture symbology as well), but it does work and is straightforward. It's possible to grab a feature service and attachments and relationship class all in go from the server itself in a file-gdb. Esri has updated the export tools. There are now two official routes that I'm aware of for exporting feature service data with attachments.
Navigate to the feature service's main about page (http://arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=xxx123456xxx), and use the [Export] link at right side, select FGDB for output format, and you're done. (If the export link is missing, [Edit] and check the Export Data box first.)
Point browser to http://services.arcgis.com/{xxx123456xxx}/arcgis/rest/services/{folder_name}/FeatureServer//createReplica
Set values to the below, unlisted items can just use default. Click on the resultant “statusURL”, and then “Result Url”, save zip file in wherever and extract a file-gdb with everything intact (except symbology).
Replica Name some_meaningful_name
Layers 0,3 (select by index number)
Return Attachments TRUE
Return Attachments by Url TRUE
Create Replica Asynchronously TRUE
Sync None
Data Format FileGDB
For interest, I also found a script to this the hard way, extracting records and attachments individually and recreating locally; see AGO_PullHostedFeatures.py by Owen Evans.
Follow this: http://support.esri.com/en/knowledgebase/techarticles/detail/43333
It is exactly what you need. I ran into this issue recently and this was the solution provided.
I know this is an old post, but I have a way to do this from any REST FeatureService that has Sync enabled. First you would need to download my restapi package on GitHub and you could run the following code:
import restapi
import json
url = 'http://yourServer.com/arcgis/rest/services/Folder/Colorado_Webmap_REST/FeatureServer'
fs = restapi.FeatureService(url) # can add username and password if secured
# test with where clause, grab only photos in Buena Vista, CO (can also add geometry filter)
where = json.dumps({"0": {"where": "City = 'BUENA VISTA'"}})
rep = fs.createReplica(0, 'Colorado', layerQueries=where) #zero is layer index, can also go by layer name
# export restapi.Replica() object to file geodatabase
out = r'C:\TEMP\ReplicaTest' #directory for new file geodatabase
restapi.exportReplica(rep, out)
