On Wed, 27 Aug 2008, Anthony Critchley wrote:
> I have a couple of problems, which I think are related. First of all I
> have recently restored my previous Moodle courses, which I had to take
> from an old server that was on its last legs.
When you transfered the courses did you simply use the moodle
backup/restore functions or a more direct database dump ? If you just used
backup/resore, then if you have the option of going back to your old
server and starting again with the transfer to the new server that might
be the quickest way of fixing your problems. The try the following
procedure :
1) Take a dump of the entire moodle database, if you're running MySQL
the mysqldump can do this at the command prompt, other DB's should have
an equivalent.
2) Zip the directories containing your moodle PHP files and moodle data
directories.
3) Transfer the DB dump and zip files to your new server.
4) Unzip the php and data files into the relevant locations on the new web
server.
5) Modify the moodle/config.php file to ensure that it reflects any
changes to file locations, urls etc on the new server
6) Restore the DB dump into your new database server.
7) Start it up !
This will give you an exact copy of the old Moodle system on the new
server and should sort out the permissions issues which you've been having
and prevent any loss of information. Once you have verified that the
transfer has worked, you can then run a normal upgrade procedure on the
new Moodle server to go to 1.9.
I've personally had some issues with the Moodle backup system when trying
to write an activity module of my own. I found that the way in which data
was restored made it effectively impossible to correctly re-associate some
of the information which I had backed up with other parts of the database.
I wouldn't expect this kind of problem to affect anything in the Moodle
core, that should be OK, but if you have 3rd-party stuff on your server
its possible that they ran into the same problems that I had. It does also
mean that I don't entirely trust the moodle backup functions for the
purposes of providing a complete system backup that can be reliably used
to restore the system exactly as before. A database dump is 100% reliable
for this purpose.
Tim W
--
Tim Williams BSc MSc MBCS - Euromotor Autotrain
Web : http://www.autotrain.org
Tel : +44 (0)121 414 2214 (ext 42214 on internal phone)
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