Howard Miller

Just to be clear - you want to give feedback but do not want to give a grade? I further assume, that this only applies to some students, not all. Otherwise, you could just send the whole class a message.

I've seen similar requirements but the answer is (or can be) to give a grade all the same. Create a scale with a single item - (something like) 'Feedback given'. Then 'grade' each student with that when feedback is supplied.

Eric Eric - I think what we are saying is that you are burning up quite a lot of goodwill.

We are happy to answer your questions but we expect you to have, at least, had a go yourself. And demonstrate that. We would anticipate that you are running Moodle and have tried to do the things you need such that your questions are more targeted.

You can get a well-paid job as a Moodle consultant and we're not going to do your work for you.

In the nicest way... one reason for not getting good answers is not asking good questions

I would start with....

https://docs.moodle.org/403/en/Internet_Information_Services#Slasharguments

(and all the other stuff about IIS in that page, probably)

No... you're missing the point.

Doing a complete backup to keep images (or however else you do it) is what I would call a "disaster recovery backup". You can get your site back if the entire VM blows up or something equally horrible.

If you want to be able to to restore individual courses then - as an administrator - you can create individual course backups automatically. They can then be used if something bad happens in an individual course. They are two different things.

There's no direct option to allow teachers to automatically create backups - unless some plugin exists that I don't know about - beyond encouraging them to take a backup before undertaking any maintenance.