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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. Yes it would be helpful if there was a batch backup utility so you could get a backup of all courses, even better if this could be automated to run by itself every night. It is one of the many admin features I would like to see added to Bb. Carol > -----Original Message----- > From: ben hyde [mailto:[log in to unmask]] > Sent: 21 November 2001 12:43 > 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. > > I hope there is something obvious and simple that we are missing that > will allow us to recreate an individual course site easily. > > > -- staff and student support information > > There are various hand-outs and help information on our LInst Online > pages: > http://online.linst.ac.uk > > > -- email unreliability > > I have reported the email unreliability to Bb support. What is the > situation with this? Is it an acknowledged failing? It would > seem to be > crucial that email delivery was 99.999% reliable as it is one > of the key > uses of blackboard. I have also heard that adding attachments can be > problematic as well. > > > -- a couple of points for the wish list: > > 1. Own posts to discussions should not be recorded as new - this is > misleading and it is time consuming having to click on your > own posts to > remove the 'new' flag. (The flagging system leaves a lot to be desired > anyway). > 2. Homepages are formatted as HTML. Therefore students have > to be taught > about <P> tags just to make their content readable as otherwise > paragraph spaces are removed. There should be an option to use text > (smart or otherwise) as there is on all the other text input boxes. > > -- > > all the best > ben > > -- > > IT Research and Development Unit > THE LONDON INSTITUTE > 65 Davies Street London W1K 5DA > > -- > > BlackBoard / LInst Ønline (staff support) > http://online.linst.ac.uk > > -- >