The Moodle User Group Greater London (MUGGL) met today and discussed institutional backup policies. It would seem most of us either turn off regular backups or have only disaster recovery in place. Ultimately the majority of people who need to restore content need to restore things from 'a moment ago' or 'not sure, I dont know who deleted it'. Therefore, I wanted to ask the wider Moodle community - why does Moodle delete anything anyway?
- Delete a user - it says and is flagged as deleted.
- Delete a role assignment (yes, unassign) - student data remains but is 'invisible'
- Delete a resource - it's gone!
- Delete user data (say from the Quiz Results table) - it's gone!
I wanted to ask, would Moodle benefit from having a 'recycle bin' - i.e. once something (anything) is deleted it's only flagged as deleted. Then when cron jobs run they check for 'deleted data' which is set to a period of time (day, week, month, year, forever) and only then is it properly and fully deleted.
Does that make sense? I think it could save some huge problems for Moodle users, and support staff. It may be hard to implement but it could be very useful.
