Backing Up / Archiving Old Courses / Sites

Backing Up / Archiving Old Courses / Sites

by Damon Blanchette -
Number of replies: 8

I know this comes up every once in a while, but the last forum post I found about this is years old.  I'd love to see what other institutions do with old courses after they are completed.

I've found some schools will individually back up each course, then save them to a hard drive or a server somewhere, ready for when a professor calls two years later and asks for old uploaded files.  Other schools install a new instance of Moodle every year (semester, term, etc) and keep the old instances running, but with a different URL (maybe tack on "2011" to the name).  Even yet other schools keep just one big instance running, but put the completed courses into an "Archive" category so they are invisible, but still available for a professor that needs it.

What do you all do?  If you back up courses and delete them from your production server, how many years do you save?  I've read that some institutions save courses going back four or five years. 

We've only used Moodle for two years, so we actually have every course still live in the production site.  So everyone who was in a course (teachers and students) two years ago is actually still in the course today and can access it as they had before.  This obviously can't work forever, so thus the reason for this post!  Thanks for any suggestions.

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In reply to Damon Blanchette

Re: Backing Up / Archiving Old Courses / Sites

by Fred Woolard -
We do course backups on a replicated host throughout the semester (keeping 5 zips) and at the end of semester archive the zips to tape.
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In reply to Fred Woolard

Re: Backing Up / Archiving Old Courses / Sites

by Damon Blanchette -

Thank you for the reply Fred!  It sounds like you do a new instance every year.  If faculty want old course stuff, you just pull out the tape and find the zip with their course to give to them?

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In reply to Damon Blanchette

Re: Backing Up / Archiving Old Courses / Sites

by Fred Woolard -

Actually, we've been continuing on the same instance since 2009. We keep past courses on the system for one semesters + 5 weeks from the time when the course ends, so Fall 2011 courses will be deleted beginning this week.

In this way, faculty can always reach back to their previous Fall or Spring courses to backup/restore to the current semester's version of that course.

We're still on 1.9, and space management has gotten to be the issue. The replication of course files (moodledata) is now selective, fetching only those course directories that are in the current semester--I've modified the backup cron job to only look at certain course categories, and the rsync uses that to filter which directories are copied (this will obviously require a re-work for 2.x).

The answer to your last question though, is yes. At the end of the semester, the most recent course .zip files go onto tape, and I keep a manifest of each tape's contents.

We've had to pull a few from tape, for courses going back more than a few semesters.

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In reply to Fred Woolard

Re: Backing Up / Archiving Old Courses / Sites

by Damon Blanchette -

Thank you Fred for clearing that up!  You're the first I've heard to have this method: kind of a combination of keeping old courses online (at least the past semester's courses) and also backing up older ones and deleting them from the live site.  We will certainly consider that one.  I'm sure the older courses get, the less likely they are to be needed by faculty.

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In reply to Damon Blanchette

Re: Backing Up / Archiving Old Courses / Sites

by Michael Aherne -
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We do a version of the second one, where we clone the live server to an "archive" then reset the courses on the live server ready for the new session. All courses on the archive servers (we now have two) are available through a custom course list block which has a tab for each year.

On the whole it has worked fairly well, the main problem being that there isn't a clear cutoff date where the whole university changes from one session to another, so the archive server is heavily used for a few months after the notional session change. We encourage people to use their own customised homepage, but of course blocks such as "latest news" only display data from the current server and this has been the cause of some confusion for people who are actively using the archive server.

We actually made the decision to do this a few years ago when we were using Moodle 1.9, the main reason being that we didn't feel we could manage the server backups if we kept everything on a single server, as each year's copy of the content would take up the same amount of space again. However, if we'd been using Moodle 2 we may have come to a different decision as multiple copies of the same file don't take up any more disk space than a single copy. I suppose the database could become pretty huge, but if we'd started off with Moodle 2 we may well have gone with a single server.

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In reply to Michael Aherne

Re: Backing Up / Archiving Old Courses / Sites

by Damon Blanchette -

Thanks for your reply Michael!  So you don't delete courses, you archive the data in them, then "reset" them.  You must just add newly-created courses as needed?  It does make sense since the actual offered courses probably don't change much year to year.  Making space for the actual archives seems to be a problem that many have had to deal with (including us, we'll need some kind of option for that).  We're kind of lucky in that we are using 2.x now, so our problems with that hopefully won't be too bad.

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In reply to Damon Blanchette

Re: Backing Up / Archiving Old Courses / Sites

by Edward Burke -

We do something similar.  We are a small institution with about 1500 courses running per academic year.  We archive courses that are 2 academic years old by creating a new category on our front page, moving the courses into that category, and then making the category hidden from teachers.  The courses "disappear" from their personal course listings but are still available if they need access in the future.  So far server space has not been an issue.

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In reply to Edward Burke

Re: Backing Up / Archiving Old Courses / Sites

by Chris Helgestad -

And are we basically talking about archiving course content?  What about user data?  How long do others keep student posts, assignments, etc beyond the end of the course?  Is there some sort of guidelines that govern this type of data (document retention policies)? 

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