>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
>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.
Ben, others,
You have hit the nail right on the head. I have been wondering about
this issue for a year or more. We have no answers either. At present
our backups are useable in one of only two ways. The first way is
the conventional disaster scenario when the entire db is restored
after hw failure of some sort. The other way would be to restore the
whole db onto another server and then login in to the restored db and
relevant course and export it as a .zip (orwhatever file format is
used). The zip file could then be moved and imported into the current
live db, overwriting the course being restored. There are numerous
issues (license for a second copy, spare servers, etc) to sort out.
The second path is marginally more useful than the first path for the
common events that backups would normally be useful for. Neither
path is satisfactory.
I would like to be able to selectively restore:
1) individual components of a course (egs: a specific folder in
course information, a specific discussion forum, a specific group
area)
2) an area of the course (egs: all of the material in course
information, all of the discussion folders, all of the group areas)
3) the whole course
I would also like to be able to exclude particular areas from back
ups (prime candidates - dropbox & group file exchange)
Simon
--
Simon Housego
Lecturer,
Institute for Interactive Media & Learning
University of Technology, Sydney
Ph 61-2-9514-1661
Fx 61-2-9514-1666
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