User Restore
Rogier van DongenThe Sebsoft User Restore Plugin offers you the possibility to restore user accounts that were deleted from moodle.
When the plugin has been installed, you can select a number of user accounts to restore and optionally send an email informing them their accounts have been restored.
This plugin takes the following into account:
- Users to be restored are checked on e-mail: if an e-mail address already exists for an active account, this user will not be restored.
- Users to be restored are checked on username: if an username already exists for an active account, this user will not be restored.
- Users to be restored are checked on MNET host: if the MNET host of the account to be restored is not the locally configured one, this user will not be restored.
Important note
Moodle removes ALL relevant data upon deleting a user account, and only the record in the user table itself remains. This utility can't do anything about this and is only capable of restoring the record from the user table.
Important note for moodle 2.7 and up
Before Moodle 2.7 there is NO way we can retrieve all information. However, with Moodle 2.7 and the new event logging tables, the original user information is stored in the event data. Therefore, from Moodle 2.7 onwards, this plugin will try and restore the original user information from there.
This effectively means, that from Moodle 2.7 onwards, we will have the correct original username, email, idnumber, picture and mnethostid. Before that, only the email could be restored, and even that method is not foolproof (due to the fact the username is cleaned with PARAM_USERNAME upon deletion).
Useful links
Screenshots
Contributors
I do have an idea, but this would have to be checked before I can be certain this assumption is correct.
Assuming you run a newer Moodle version, I'm making the assumption Moodle's most recent record in the logstore for any of the deleted users might lack the correct information.
This would be the information that should be available in the "other" field of the table.
If you have access to the database you could try and see if my assumption is correct by filtering the logstore under the following conditions:
component = 'core'
action= 'deleted'
target = 'user'
objectid = Do note you should sort in descending order on the timecreated field of the logstore, then lookat the first record found (i.e. the most recent one for the specific user)
I have tried to message you from moodle.org's messaging system but I seem to be unable to send you a message at all.
If you need/want more support, I advice you to contact me directly, you can send me a message on moodle.org if needed so we can go from there.
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For everyone else reading along: the note Gemma added on Oct 21 is one of the side effects of a rewrite.
Older version of this plugin worked directly on the logstore table. This caused an gigantic CPU load and in many cases, a timeout when trying to load the overview page.
The newer version works by hooking in to Moodle's user_deleted event handler, which executes on a per user basis, directly after the user has been deleted.
To speed up loading the information on the overview pages in this plugin, information is stored in a cache record (which of course is cleaned after a purge).
While this does speed up the overview pages, it does have the side effect of potentially massively slowing down the process of batch-deleting 100s or 1000s of users.
As soon as I have the time, I'm willing to look into a solution to resolve this new side effect. However, for the time being I cannot make any promises yet.
Cheers,
Rogier
This information went missing. Apparently this message window cleans out anything resembling HTML tags (would be nice if Moodle would convert this to visible characters instead of completely cleaning it)
There's a simple reason for this: the cache refill should fill all deleted users and this warning message (or better said: informative message) is basically telling you there are deleted users that are not in the cache. There's no real way to get around this message for now but I'll see if I can change this for one of the next versions.
The plugin should work for 3.9 btw (as you already found out); the supported Moodle versions however havent (yet) been updated (or verified for all that matters).
Cheers, Rogier
Cheers, Rogier
Can you please provide an up to date source control url for Moodle 3.10 ?
Checked up to Moodle 3.10.
Note the following changes:
- Decoding the event data now takes the JSON format setting of the logstore into account (decoding should hence be transparent no matter what serialisation method is used).
- user_deleted handler now no longer works by default. It must be enabled to work (reason: see Gemma's comment; bulk deletion is severely impacted)
- Cache refill can now be done 10 records at the time (apart from the full refill and smart refill that already existed).
- Added notification indicating the number of missing cache records.
Source control URL has been fixed (sorry for the massive delays; this year has been messy and chaotic indeed).
Cheers!
Rogier
Please, help me, I have about 30,000 accounts, 1464 of them have been deleted. The plugin is installed 3.6.1 (LTS Moodle 3.5), just a week ago the plugin worked and restored users. Now he says fill the cache. I tried to append and full refill the cache, tried it the same way through CLI (--execute = tool_userrestore \ task \ filldeletedcache) I waited for a couple of hours, reinstalled the plugin .... it did not help. I see that the task is starting, but it does nothing, there is no load on the CPU. What else to try?
Dave
Every now and then I think about tackling this in a different way, but one of the major challenges is that we cannot resolve things without severe impact on processing time.
The reasons for this are plenty: the log tables in Moodle, especially on MySQL, are notoriously slow due to the huge amount of records.
This makes JOIN-ing virtually impossible, hence the reason to try and implement some form of caching. However, filling the cache is also tediously slow when there are a substantial amount of users that were marked as deleted.
We might even end up doing a complete rewrite, implementing a range of ways to use this tool. For our original use cases the tool works flawlessly, but again: when there are 100's or even 100's of deleted users I agree with the process becoming rather unusable. I hope to be able to follow up on this some time soon, but it could take a while.
Cheers, Rogier