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>-- usefulness of back-ups > >We have recently had a couple of major loses of information from >individual course sites and therefore looked at how we could recover >them from the server back-ups. In case you are interested, one was >deleted by mistake the other was caused by an anomaly whereby all the >previous announcements were wiped when a new one was posted. After >investigating this I discovered that there doesn't seem to be any way to >recreate or restore a course or sections of a course using the >Bb/docs/courses/1/folder data. This is because the crucial information - >about folder structure and names etc - is not stored in the courses >folder but in the database - so when you recreate the contents folder >the items will still not be displayed within the course. > >It seems that the only way to maintain a usable back-up would be to >archive each course and this cannot be done automatically. We are going >to look into whether we can devise a mechanism to automate this for all >courses. Has anyone else tried to do this? Has anyone else managed to >recover lost information from a course site? What is the purpose of the >back-ups if you cannot extract a particular courses content? The back-up >would only help if you were going to over right the complete courses >folder and database. So all the activity after the back-up was taken >would be wiped - which seems to cause more problems than it would solve. In our case, the purpose of the backup is to be able to restore the system after a catastrophe, eg, disk failure, serious database corruption, or fire in the computer room. In this case, we are more interested in saving several years of work, even though we may lose the last few hours. As far as retrieving material from individual courses, it may not be too difficult if you have a complete backup of the Blackboard data files. In our case, we are able to run up Blackboard on another machine using the files from the backup. The problem course can be exported, then imported again into the production system. So this allows restoration of a whole course. It may also enable you to at least recover material from a course, although perhaps not exactly as it was. For example, deleted postings could be recovered from the backup (cut and paste), but they will not be able to be reinstated under the original owner. However, the instructor could post them as a new posting if the content was really important. 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