Installing and upgrading help

"who is good at communicating"? Sure there are kind souls, angels and fairies - in their respective domains. The hardned IT crowd in the virtual world worship Murpy, the creator of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law, and the survivors are usually old, male cynics.

> HOW to "run a command line"? Where do I find my "workbench"?

That kind of interactions require some intensive communication. I am not sure whether you'll enjoy that.

> I WILL NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE SAYING IF YOU USE LINGO THAT IS UNDERSTOOD TO TECHY PEOPLE.

Oh yes, there's ample proof.

> Howard, you often like to respond with rudeness and smart alec words, and I would rather you keep all of your amazing knowledge to yourself rather than treat me with rudeness.

Well, if you master ESP, we all can try hard to communicate in silence.
;-D

You are asking for free help.  Starting with insults does not help.

If your upgrade has not gone well, you need to restore the whole site from a backup.  Not knowing anything about your server setup or whether are hosted or not gives us absolutely nothing to go on.  Despite your tone, I am sure many of us would be happy to help but we need a lot more information.

If your site is hosted somewhere, you need to talk to them.  

Here's an attempt at answering those questions:

"Command line" is equivalent to "Command Prompt (Admin)" when you right click the Windows button. Or on previous versions of Windows, Right click "Command Prompt" and "Run as adminsitrator". To run Moodle command line options, you'll need to be in your Moodle site directory (where the .php files are).

"Workbench" is a graphical program provided by MySQL to administer MySQL from Windows. You can download it from their website.

Please understand that the help here is free and no one is paid to answer your questions. We tend to assume that if you're running your own Moodle server that you have some basic knowledge of running a server, web server, database and php. Simply stating the fact that you don't have that knowledge and asking for some more detailed help is the best way of getting it.

Wendi, could you let us know where you are in your steps?  It sounds like you upgraded from Moodle 2.8 to 3.0, then tried downgrading to 2.9.  You can't downgrade moodle, it doesn't work that way.

Is anything working right now?

Do you have backups of anything?

If your upgrade to Moodle3 was successful, you might need to reinstall Moodle3.

How have you been upgrading and downgrading?  We need to know exactly what steps you did so that we can help.

I most commonly run "the command line" by using an application, like "Terminal" on my Mac.  PC users might use applications like "Putty."  But to run the command line applications, you would also need to know how to SSH into your server.  Do you?

There are other ways to issue commands to your moodle, such as using applications like Workbench.  But most of us who do these things (I don't want to speak for everyone, sorry) probably use a terminal program like Terminal or Putty, and we know how something about SSH.  If your answer is "no" to SSH, this will tell us some good information.

Christoph, Unfortunately I haven't handled Moodle implementation to a large scale personally to be very confident about everything, but, what comes into my mind is time out error in priority if you're keeping default value of 300, try increasing it. also I have been updating the blog entry, for videos once created cant be edited that easy, so remains text editing, and I did added max.vars_input = 2000 (default is disabled and values to 1000), for moodle has more than 1000 tables so when importing DB in PhpMyAdmin it was giving errors (could be one of the possibility).

Also, go into Site administration > performance > PHP Limit, for newer themes default values to 512MB, if you are using 3.0+ then try increasing it, or in case of older ones set it at maximum to see if it helps restoring large courses.

Lastly,  have you set yours up using PHP 7? as until PHP 7, though 64-bit experiential PHP was available, but it wasn't fully supporting the long integer values in DB, but PHP 7 with full support for 64-bit will bring PHP's performance on windows platform equal to Linux, so large size imports of courses shouldn't be an issue.

Just before making any above changes, just try using barracuda conversion and see if  that works, then start taking turns in terms of above inputs, whatever the outcome to be, let me know so to think of some other possibilities and if fingers crossed it worked, let that know too, may help someone else as last time i spent time with someone having similar issue it all came down to using PHP 7 64-bit, but they couldn't for the WordPress wasn't working on that (may have started working now)

Tommy, Error is evident, dataroot directory is not writable, have you given permission to IUSR for Modify/Write in your moodledata directory?

Regarding the conversion, there is absolutely no impact in terms of using that i have as well explained in the video of antelope to barracuda conversion, unless you are backing up and restoring large courses, then you can expect this to come handy, else performance wise or functionality wise, no impact at all.