At 9:35 AM +0000 23/11/01, Cooper, Carol D. wrote:
>We also experience a loss of a course recently. We were lucky in that the
>tutor did not have much material up and was "happy" to rebuild it. However,
>like many others, I had not realised until this point that you could not
>restore a single course from the backup. It seems very time consuming to
>have to build Bb on a separate machine just to recover one course. This
>would be at least half a days work as far as I can see, and assumes you have
>a spare machine to do this with.
Hello Carol
I may be wrong, and maybe someone can correct me if so, but in
Courseinfo level 1 on Solaris, the "backup" capability appears to
just produce a dump of the database. However, there are lots of other
course files that live in directories in the Courseinfo tree. These
appear to be mostly attachments, files to be downloaded by students
and things in the dropbox.
If you have accidentally deleted a course, Blackboard will probably
have deleted all the files too. In order to fully restore a course
then, you need the database AND the associated files.
So the backup of your system needs to be not only Blackboard's backup
process, but also a simultaneous backup of all the files in the
directory tree so that they are all matched up. (If you're wondering
why it needs to be simultaneous, imagine doing Blackboard's backup,
then an hour later backing up the directory. What if someone has
added a course in the meantime, or even deleted or changed some
items? If you have to restore, what will you get?)
Because of these issues, we chose to ignore Blackboard's backup
process. We shut down Courseinfo at about 4am each morning, copy the
entire directory tree, then restart Courseinfo. It is done by a Unix
shell script and takes about 10 minutes.
We now have a complete copy of the whole Courseinfo installation each
day. (Actually, we tar it into an archive and compress it. We keep
several days' worth just in case, and copy it to another machine as
well.)
Should we ever need to restore the system, either on our production
machine or on another, it is simply a case of creating the ciuser
account if it is not there, expanding the archive, and starting
Courseinfo.
Regards
David
--
David Morrison, Systems Specialist
Flexible Learning Administrator and Blackboard Project Manager
Web Development Team, IESD, The University of Newcastle, Australia
E-mail [log in to unmask]
Ph +61 2 49215397 Fax +61 2 49217087
|