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
> 
> --
>