BackUp last year's course

Even though ECS has good backups of all Moodle courses you might want to do your own backup and store the zip file (for that is what is produced) on your own Mac or PC.

Preliminaries

1. Login to Moodle and navigate to your last year's course. It'll be in category 2004-05 : <division>.
2. Display the Adminstration block if it is not already visible (scroll down the page to check):
   Click turn editing on
   In Blocks pull down Add —> Adminstration
3. The Administration block appears

STEP 1

Decide whether you want to save all the student work which has been uploaded into your course, such as assignments, forum discussions or other stuff your students may have uploaded. This is termed user data. Probably you'll not want to save this user data.

1. Select Adminstration : backup
2. click None for user data
3. Pulldowns:
   Metacourse: no
   Users : none
   Logs : no
   User files : no
   Course files : yes
   
   It doesn't matter if there are activities selected which weren't in your course - these just will not get backed up.
4. click continue

graphic of backup progress

Remember that Resources are separate from course files — you may have some URLs from the web as Resources or you may have files in the Course files area that are not linked as resources.

STEP 2

The filename used for backup has the format : backup-<course name>-<year><month><day>-<time>.zip, for example backup-enpr_111-20050802-1550.zip

Do read the notice. Even though it may be in red type this is probably what you want to do. If you realise that you have made a mistake (eg you really wanted to backup user data as well) then click Cancel at the bottom of the page.

Backup Details: List of Activity types and number of instances, eg:

A zero means that nothing was present and nothing gets backed up.

Click Continue

STEP 3

Now the system performs the backup job and writes the compressed data into the backup zip file shown in the previous step.

When the job has finished you should see 'backup completed successfully'.

Click Continue

STEP 4

The backup file is now placed in the backup data folder within Files.

To download to your own computer:

1. Right-click (or Command-click Mac) on the backup file.
2. Choose Save Link As (Firefox) or Save Target As (I.E) and save in your My Documents or Documents folder.
3. The download may take some time depending upon the size of the backup file.

You now have last year's course in it's entirety safely backed up. You can 'restore' this into an existing course or a new course in Moodle.