How Do You Delete Old Assignments?

Re: How Do You Delete Old Assignments?

by ben reynolds -
Number of replies: 2

Since this is database work a programmer or super super user would need to know how to do, you would need to announce in a news forum or some such that the files are no longer available. I'm guessing that the links would no longer exist.

As we have requirements here in the US to preserve these records, we don't actually anticipate removing them until 2 or so years after the course has ended. At which point we archive the course and only go back to it as needed, which, so far has been, essentially never.

Storage being so cheap now, I'm wondering if you really need to delete them.

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In reply to ben reynolds

Re: How Do You Delete Old Assignments?

by Jez H -

Hi Ben,

We are looking at coding something to do this.

We will be dealing with perhaps 100,000 assignments per year, some are quite large, video assignments for example.

We take full system backups which gobbles up more space.

It also means these backups take longer to run, consume more network traffic, storage etc.

I guess we will keep our assignments for at least 18 months but will want to retain the Moodle course itself for perhaps three. The problem is you cannot separate assignment submission from course content.

Another little statistic, in 12 months running 50% online submisison (rest offline) we more than doubled the size of a Moodle instance with several years worth of teaching materials within it, it was built in 2008 and we imported existing courses into it then.

I guess over time if left unchecked our Moodle file system will become perhaps 80% unneeded assignments and 20% useful content.

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In reply to Jez H

Re: How Do You Delete Old Assignments?

by ben reynolds -

Those are some compelling numbers. Or, more accurately, daunting.

I'm not sure what you mean about assignment submissions can't be separated from content.

This will be intriguing to follow.

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