I just performed a backup of a course, then restored it to an existing course. Everything got copied fine except the topics comments found in the Topic Outline (main page for the course). None of those comments got copied across. I'm using Topic format for the course.
Did I miss something, or is this not being included in the backup procedure? Thanks for your feedback.
Hi Eloy,
You are right. When I restore the backup to a new course, all the topic summary contents are there. I was restoring to an existing but empty course. No topic summaries were being added or replaced. I understand the logic now. It makes sense NOT to replace these topics if the course is not empty.
Thanks!
Ah...I had the same problem. I think that it would be nice if when topic summaries are empty then backing up into an existing course writes into these empty, but I understand the logic and I will remember in future that the course creation processes (when I restore a lot of courses for the first time) should contain the topic summaries.
In the meantime perhaps I should attempt some SQL.
Tim
Wow- all I gotta say is, you guys rock. I've been absent from the forums for too much, and freaked out just now when I realized this was happening here. I've been the "moodle evangelist" for almost a year now, very aggressively getting people to adopt it, and turning it into a production-standard application at our school. I just discovered this problem, and was freaking out, realizing that it would totally screw the processes we'd designed (build a master course, migrate [backup and restore] it out to sections) if the topics/weeks material didn't copy over.
Then I realized, based on these posts of yours, that I appended a course, instead of overwriting. I too see the logic, although It sure would be cool if it could append the fields (so if they were blank, add what you got, and if not, just add more - which would be obvious) or even have an option.
So now I'm breathing a sigh of relief, knowing that the solution is to simply overwrite instead of append the restore. But now we have another problem we ran into...
Most of us (myself included) are not admins. So I have a course I've tweaked all semester and taught with, so I back it up without users, and restore it to the blank master the admins created for me, and in which I'm an instructor.
Problem is, if I restore, OVERWRITING everything as just discussed, it removes the users, since I never care to copy user data (since the students don't need to copy over). This in turn, removes me, the instructor, from the course- so now it's restored, but I can't get in!! Kind of funny, but needs resolution. Any suggestions?
Would be nice if you could not do user data, but maybe have an instructor option (i.e. "maintain instructors" or something like it)
D.I.
Well- played around a bit and I have a halfway solution. It's workable enough that we can deal with it, but it does offend my sensibilities a bit:
When you overwrite the entire course, as I've done (since I want the entire contents, and only want to keep the instructor) it removes all users- but since I'm still an instructor based on my session (that is I haven't logged out yet) I can go in an add myself as an instructor.
It seems a bit contrived, and I'm open to other options- but very glad to have a workaround.
D.I.
