Installing and upgrading help

Are you aware of the Moosh utility 

https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?id=522

Have you thought about archiving old courses, e.g. finding courses where has been no activity for x amount of time (e.g. 3 years), then backing them up/restoring to an archive server or deleting or whatever?

Just to be clear when you are posting in these forums, Moodle is not lousy at anything, it is the one true marvellous way of doing everything

Really it's up to you... if you are coming from the perspective of wanting to do a big cleanup then is starting fresh easier than tidying up the instance you have. It depends really. I don't think we can answer that for you. 

My inclination is to suggest that a tidy up is safer/easy. 

I kind of know what you mean about Moodle cleaning up but you have to be realistic. How does moodle *know* that (for example) a course has finished and is no longer required. How does it *know* that a user has left. These are very much implementation specific requirements. If it was easy it would have been done. 

I used to do this annually almost.  I think it is a great way to clean things up.  Restoring the courses can be a pretty slow process though.

Can you give us an idea of how many courses you are talking about?  Advice may differ if you have 20 courses versus 500 courses.

Make sure to make a backup, and try restoring this backup to another location to verify that your backup is good.

When Moodle 2.0 was released, I had decided to start from scratch (for my very small moodle, around 8 courses.)  However, I made a backup of my moodle 1.9 site, and I have restored this 1.9 on my Mac in MAMP so that I still have access to all of my old course information.

I might start from scratch again when Moodle 3.0 hits us, even though 3.0 is not going to be as significant a change as 1.9 to 2.0 was.  I am planning to do this because 1) I want to get my database size small again (for backup control), and 2) to get my quiz question bank cleaned up (when you import/restore a single course, many more quiz questions are restored that will surprise you.)

Hi Greg,

I'm the administrator/developer for a med-large University here in Canada and we found that the easiest thing to do is stand up a new instance of Moodle every semester. It's very quick and easy to spawn a new instance and import the users and new courses for the semester. Each semester we have that option to use a newer version of Moodle or continue on with the current version. We have had a few occasions (in the past) where an upgrade had failed causing a massive headaches and chaos. Having a clean instance every semester cuts out all upgrading potential issues

Every time we stand up a new instance or have code changes we run a series of functional tests and load tests to make sure none of our custom code changes or plugins fail. Our fall semester starts in a few weeks here and will called 201503, at the same time I'll backup all the courses for our 201403 semester and make those course backups available to the Prof's. 

After a few times doing this I found my rhythm and now have a smooth clean cut server (especially the database) every semester.

Ping me anytime if you have questions

Thankyou to so many of you who have replied and sorry for the delay in my own response.  For those that have asked, here are some further details about our Moodle instal.

We are currently on 2.6.2, planning to upgrade to 2.9.x in Jan 2016. We are hosted and I have no direct access to the box.

We have the accumulation of 5 years of activity in the system.  Prior to me joining these was a very 'organic' use of Moodle, that has resulted in a very messy back yard.  We have spent much of this year tidying up.

• We have over 3,000 course, only about 800 of which have had students access them this year.
  
• We have over 200,000 users, only about 10% of which are current
  

We have to rollover our delivery at the end of the year anyway, and so wondering if it is the opportunity to 'clean slate' with a new instal.  We recognise this will be a mountain more work, so are trying to determine whether the payoff is worth it.

Here are some stats of about a month ago

-----------------------------

Here is a look at our log tables (top 10, by size)

thoughts?  I know there is a lot of "shades of grey" in this type of decision making, but could benefit from the collective wisdom of those who have travelled this road ahead of me.

Thanks again, Greg

Greg, another thing to think about depending on the course contents is potential future audits. We have to keep various levels of records from 2-30 years (mixture of requirements for retaining RTO status and organisational requirements) so perhaps a rolling archive model would suit e.g. initially just move old courses to an "Archive" category but leave them on live server (to me, less work if someone needs to audit in the initial period than restoring a backup of an old course with the resulting issues if the codes changed) and then backup and archive outside Moodle in due time.

H