Course users not saved in Moodle 1.6 backup

Course users not saved in Moodle 1.6 backup

by Joseph Rézeau -
Number of replies: 4
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Hello!

On my university Moodle 1.6+ server I regularly do a backup of my courses, in order to restore them to my local Moodle installation. Thus I can study the various logs by using phpMyadmin and mySql queries locally, which I cannot do on the university server where I do not have Admin rights. It all worked quite well until recently about 10 days ago), when the university Moodle server has stopped saving users info in the backups.

This is similar to the problems described in this thread: when I do a backup of one of my courses on the university server, asking the backup to include Course users and Logs, everything seems to work fine, I get no error message. Curiously, however, the backup screen correctly displays the number of course students saved, but says 0 logs have been saved.

When I examine the moodle.xml file in the zipped backup file, however, I find that the <USERS>...</USERS> section is altogether missing and, of course, cannot be restored (but the <LOGS>...</LOGS> section is there, and is not empty!

Unfortunately, as I am not admin on the university server there is not much I can do to find out the source of the problem. All I can say is that - apart from this irritating problem - the server is working fine, the students' visits are correctly logged, etc.

I would be most grateful if someone (Eloy?) could point to possible solutions, since I do need to be able to do full backup of my courses for local restoration, as this is the only way for me to do my research on the activity logs of my students.

Thanks for any help,

Joseph

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In reply to Joseph Rézeau

Re: Course users not saved in Moodle 1.6 backup

by Helen Foster -
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Hi Joseph,

Please could you state which version of Moodle 1.6 your university is using and whether an upgrade could have possibly caused the problem.
In reply to Helen Foster

Re: Course users not saved in Moodle 1.6 backup

by Joseph Rézeau -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators
Hi Helen,
Thanks for your reply. Our admin is indeed suspecting that our problem might be linked to an upgrade, but I doubt it...
I managed to do successful backups (including course users) with Moodle 1.6.2 and also after we upgraded to 1.6.3 (on october 10th). My very last complete backup on the university server dates back to October 17th. I do hope our admin will find the reason for this strange bug soon.
Joseph
In reply to Joseph Rézeau

Re: Course users not saved in Moodle 1.6 backup

by Joseph Rézeau -
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Our admin has solved the problem. It was something to do with the mySql configuration. He will post more details here shortly.
Joseph
In reply to Joseph Rézeau

Re: Course users not saved in Moodle 1.6 backup -> increasing MySQL wait_timeout

by Arnaud Saint-Georges -
Salut Joseph.
Et merci pour ta description détaillée du problème.

I set debug variable to Yes to get PHP's errors.
I got this error:
MySQL server has gone away

I looked at MySQL documentation :
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/gone-away.html
and found that wait_timeout should be increased.

So I have set the wait_timeout variable from 60 (!) to 600 and, as you know, backups work fine now.
Note that wait_timeout default is 28800.

Bien à toi,
Arnaud