Moodle in English: Clone course without duplicating assets

Courses and course formats

Clone course without duplicating assets

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Clone course without duplicating assets

by Albert R. - Saturday, August 3, 2019, 7:19 AM

I know that in order to duplicate a course, the way to do it (or at least the one I see recommended the most) is by backing up the course without user data and restoring it as a new course.

The issue I'm facing is that some of the courses we have incorporate a lot of "file" assets, not just images, but also SCORM packages that take lots and lots of space (we're talking GBs). When duplicating a course, that backup and restore process is a nightmare, without even getting into how much space those courses take in our platform.

I was wondering if there is a way of duplicating (or backing up/restoring) a course where only the database info is duplicated, but all files are just referenced from one spot so all the duplicated courses just use them.

Is there a way to do this?

Re: Clone course without duplicating assets

by Davo Smith - Saturday, August 3, 2019, 2:53 PM

That's already what happens with every file uploaded to Moodle; it uses a content-based file system, so that any files with the identical content (according to the SHA1 hash value generated from that content), are stored only once. The only overhead is an extra record in the database table mdl_files that references the file in the same location it was already stored. Read more at https://docs.moodle.org/dev/File_API_internals

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Re: Clone course without duplicating assets

by Albert R. - Monday, August 5, 2019, 5:28 AM

Thank you for your reply, I will definitely look into that.

The thing I can't find info about then is: is it possible to do those course backups without the files in a way that when restoring the backup as a new course the files get associated to the newly created course? Because right now, when creating backups, all the files get included and that's part of my problem, it creates huge backup files.

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