I have moodle server 1.9+ running with about 20 courses on it. I have another server 1.8.x running with about 30 courses on it. I would like to backup server 1.8.x and bulk upload the courses to the 1.9+ server. I'm afraid that the one set of courses may overwrite the existing ones. Please, any advice will be appreciated.
Thank you
If doing it all in bulk then yes, they may cause a problem, but one at a time, annoying yes, but it will get the job done. The trouble is if you append materials to a course, then you are duplicating a lot of stuff. If you overwrite, delete first then write, you are replacing later materials with older ones. Neither are desirable outcomes, so one course at a time gives you complete control. You may want to append some courses, overwite others but there are about 10 courses you can restore in your 1.9.x without fear of damaging anything, that would be a good place to start.
Sorry, I wasn't very clear in my original post. There are 20 original courses on the 1.8 server and 30 on the 1.9+ server making a total of 50 original courses. Adding them would require me to create the course then upload the docs for each course - 30 times. Correct?
Hi Charlotte,
No, you can backup the course with all its files, download to your desktop, and upload to 1.9 server, provided your max upload size is larger than the size of the backup file.
You create one course on the 1.9 server and use it to upload each backup file. You then restore each backup to a new course, being careful to give each restoration a unique short name different from any of the 30 on your 1.9 server.
This assumes the docs you want are course files and not user files. If, like us, you have a generic teacher in all your classrooms, it may be that some docs belong to a generic user, and then you'll have to backup & restore with user files (&, probably, with users).
One clarification, Charlotte, would be helpful. Are the 1.8 and 1.9 courses all unique courses?
As in:
English 101 is on 1.8 but English 102 is on 1.9. Science 404 is on 1.9 but Science 405 is on 1.8.
Yes you are correct. English 101 is on 1.8 and English 102 is only on 1.9.
Well, that's good. It means that, unless your short course names are identical, whatever you restore will likely not overwrite what's in 1.9.
OTOH, depending on which modules you're restoring per course, I think I remember that some stuff doesn't come through perfectly. Unfortunately, I can't remember what. Our move 1.8 > 1.9+ was more than a year ago.
You might want to Google "using Moodle 1.8 1.9" and see what turns up. Test Quiz, especially. But maybe also Lesson. [Caps for Moodle modules.]
Ben is right, there is a couple of issues between 1.8 and 1.9, and most fo those were centred around the plugins - if I remember rightly. So, if I also remember you can backup courses in 1.8 the same way you can in 1.9, that is in sections.
What you may be able to do is to backup course files, WITHOUT site files, roles and User files. If this is correct, then do that first. Restore them to 1.9, and you should be able to do so with a minimum of fuss. Quizzes caused the most angst from memory, but there were a number of discussions about those issues in the Quiz forum that you may want to read.
Then backup Users and User data, and STUDENT ROLES WITHOUT course files, other roles and site files. Restore them, if you need to. You may be able to restore students without their data, if you want to do it that way, but I cannot remember what functionality is available to you in 1.8... too long ago and not sufficiently well learned to remember much at all before going to 1.9...
That is, I suggest, the safest way of doing things, one bit at a time. I know a little time consuming, but safer. If worse comes to worse, you can unzip the files and edit the moodle.xml file to remove anything you do not want in it, rezip them and restore the modified files. There is a lot of xml data in the file that you do not really need to successfully restore courses.
If you restore and get a block error, for example, look for the block in the unzipped xml file, delete it and rezip, upload and continue. You may have to remove all references to non-core blocks and some users, Admin user in particular, but it can work.
