Howard Miller

This isn't a Moodle question, as such. It depends on a lot of things - mostly what your VPS distro is.

I would say one thing - make very sure you have a good database backup before you try to do anything. I have had very poor experiences attempting to upgrade MySQL / MariaDB. Personally, I would consider upgrading the whole VPS to a suitably newer version.

Why not? What problem are you trying to fix?

 

If you really have some objection to this page then the easiest thing would be to block the URL in your webserver config. I wouldn't recommend hacking core Moodle code to do it. If you're anything like me, you'll forget. 

It's VERY hard to install a plugin more than once. So, I doubt that's the problem.

Let's start with the Moodle version and telling us what errors you are seeing? Make sure you have Debugging enabled so that the full error trace is available.

Do you mean this... Automated_course_backup ?

Nobody can answer that for you. It depends on how many courses you have and how big they are. It's also quite resource intensive.