Moving courses from Moodle 2.2.1 server to new 3.1.2 server

Moving courses from Moodle 2.2.1 server to new 3.1.2 server

by Eric Broach -
Number of replies: 1

Hi All - I apologize in advance if I'm posting this to the wrong forum. (If so, could you please tell me which one would be better?)

Does anyone know the best way to migrate a course from a Moodle 2.2 server to a completely separate Moodle 3.1 server?

Our IT department has created a new virtual server (Windows Server with MS SQL, I believe) for us running a "clean install" of Moodle 3.1.2, and it seems to be working great, but I'm not sure how to best move our old courses to it. Would it be best to back up a course on our old Moodle 2.2.1 server, save it as an .MBZ file on my local desktop, and then upload it to the new server and restore it? I've tried doing that several times, and I when I drag and drop the .MBZ file, I keep getting the same error message: "Error connecting to the server" (see attached).

Error message from Moodle 3.1


Thanks very much,

Eric Broach

Gexa Energy

Attachment Moodle 3.1 Error EB.png
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In reply to Eric Broach

Re: Moving courses from Moodle 2.2.1 server to new 3.1.2 server

by Ken Task -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers

There is a better forum for this
https://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=746
Backup and Restore is better forum ...
although your description of what you are doing could also fall into
Installing and upgrading cause it is a 'not running fine' server
to which you are restoring or this would work. ;)

However, may as well begin here ...

Somewhere around 2.6 of Moodle there was an option for turning on
'Experimental backup compression'.   System Admin would have to do that for you
if you are not the admin of the 2.x site.
What that did ... used gzip for better/smaller compression of backups.
If one didn't have that turned on a made a backup, the backup still had a
.mbz extension ... which stands for 'moodle backup zip' (I think).  With experimental compression turned on, the backups still kept the .mbz file name extension.

All that to explain that simply changing the extension from .zip to .mbz won't actually do anything to the contents of the file itself.   A .zip is NOT a .tgz.

So ... first check in the 2.2.1 if there is an option for experimental compression that can be turned on.  Turn it on.  Then make the backup.

The error that pops up really doesn't tell us much ... was it the web server that dropped connection or was the DB server that dropped connection?
Suggest turning on Debugging on new site and then we might get more useful information.

Before that, however, upload by using the 'choose file' button (upper left corner of the screen where one uploads) and  upload the old fashion way.   You could be having an issue with 'drag and drop' which, hopefully, debugging would disclose.

'spirit of sharing', Ken

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