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Export and import

Exporting a project produces a snapshot file you can store, share, or import elsewhere. Importing brings a snapshot into your environment as a new project. Together, the two are the canonical way to move work between online and desktop, hand off a project to a different team, or back up before a major change. An archive export does the same for many projects at once — you choose which of the projects you administer go into the file. For the click-by-click flow, see the how-to guide linked in Related.

Learning objectives

By the end of this lesson you should be able to:

  • Export a project as a snapshot file
  • Export the projects you choose — or everything you administer — as a single archive, with or without archived projects
  • Import a snapshot into a new project, or pick projects out of an archive
  • Recognize what the round-trip preserves and what it does not

What round-trips cleanly​

PreservedNot preserved
Features (geometry, type codes, attributes, explosives, relationships)User permissions and sharing assignments
Layers and layer organizationPending access requests and request history
Criteria selections and settingsShare tokens, their expiry and memo
Result sets and drawings (snapshots, not live re-runs)Undo / redo stack
Markup, to-do items, notesAnalysis Results
Relationship Groups
Archived status (archive import only)

The "not preserved" list is intentional — a snapshot has no idea what user accounts exist in the destination environment, so it cannot meaningfully replay sharing, and the file never carries the share token or request history at all. The undo/redo stack is intentionally dropped because the operations on it reference internal IDs that do not survive the round-trip.

warning

After importing a previously shared project, you must reassign sharing and permissions explicitly. Plan for this whenever you hand off a project to a new owner. See Sharing.

Where exports live​

Single-project export is on the Project Management page's per-project Actions menu (⋮) → Export Snapshot, and on the project dashboard's Settings menu (gear icon) → Export. The exported file is a .siter-snapshot that you save to disk.

Pick a name that includes both the project identity and the export date — siter-fortexample-2026-05-15.siter-snapshot is far more useful in six months than export.siter-snapshot.

Exporting many projects at once​

The Project Management page toolbar's Import or export projects button (box icon) → Export projects… builds one .siter-archive from the projects you select. The Export projects dialog lists every project on which you hold the Project Administration Permission — nothing more is ever offered — with all of them ticked; untick what you don't want, search or use the column filters to find rows in a long list, click a column header to sort by Name, Installation – Location, or Status, and click Export (N). The dialog mirrors the archive import dialog on purpose: pick from a table going out, pick from a table coming in.

Include archived projects adds your archived projects to the list, ticked; archived projects go into the file as archived and come back out archived. Turning the toggle off removes them from the list and from the export, so the selected count always tells the truth about the file you'll get.

The file is named siter-projects-<date>-<time>.siter-archive and can take a few minutes to build for large portfolios. While it builds, the page toolbar shows an Export: indicator with the project counter (3 / 12) and a progress bar — hover it for the current project's name and the megabytes received so far — plus a Cancel export button. The export runs in the background, so you can open a project and keep working; return to the Project Management page to check on it or cancel it. With everything ticked it is the routine backup: one file, every project, no per-project clicking. The completion message reports how many of the selected projects made it into the file, and stays on screen if any could not be exported. Only one archive export runs per account at a time.

Importing​

Import is Import or export projects (box icon) → Import project… at the top of the Project Management page — or drag the file from your computer onto the page. Either route accepts both file types, including a copy the browser renamed on download (project.siter-snapshot (1).json):

  • Snapshot — the project is imported straight away and opens on the map.
  • Archive — the Import Projects from Archive dialog lists every project in the file. Search by name, location, installation, or organization, filter the columns, tick the ones you want (the header checkbox picks everything currently shown), and click Import (N). Projects import one at a time with a progress bar; Stop finishes the current one and skips the rest, and Retry failed / Import skipped run the leftovers again. Rows marked Not in archive failed during export and cannot be imported. A project that imported but left something behind shows Imported with warnings in the Result column — filter or sort the column to find them, and click a row to read its warning.

Import needs only the Project Read Permission, so a Siter Desktop install with a read-only license can import projects to review them, and run analysis on them.

A project whose hosted imagery background isn't available to you on the destination server imports with no background map selected and a warning. Choose a background under Map Background afterwards if you can edit the project.

Imported projects keep their original name. Only when you already have a project with that name does the new one become <name> - Imported <date> — unlike Copy, which always produces "[Name Copy]". Archived projects in an archive stay archived, so turn on Show Archived to find them afterwards.

Verify the import succeeded by:

  1. Confirming the project appears on the Project Management page
  2. Opening the project and verifying criteria, default attribute preset, and feature count match the source
  3. Running analysis to confirm results match the source (small differences may indicate criteria-engine version drift)

Round-trip vs Copy​

Export-and-reimport can be used to produce a fresh project in a different environment. Copy produces a fresh project in the same environment. Pick:

  • Export/import when moving between online and desktop, or to a different organization
  • Copy when you want to explore an alternative inside the same Siter environment

Try it​

Export an existing project, then import the snapshot back into the same environment as a new project. Confirm:

  1. Features, criteria, and result sets all match the source
  2. Sharing is intentionally absent on the import
  3. The undo/redo stack is empty on the imported copy
  4. Live analysis on the imported project produces the same results as the source
  5. The imported project is named <name> - Imported <date>, because the original still exists

Then use Export projects… with Include archived projects on and every row ticked (sort by Status to see the archived ones together), import two of the projects from the archive — one active, one archived — and confirm the archived one comes back archived. Finally, export again with only a single project ticked and confirm the archive's import dialog lists just that one.