Moodle with Melinda - Restore a Course from Backup

Occasionally situations arise that require the restoration of a Moodle course from a zipped backup file.  Some of these situations include: receiving a course that was shared by another person, recovering a course that had become corrupt, rewinding to a previous version of a course that had been updated, moving the course from one server to another, or creating a new course from an older course.

Moodle makes restoring courses from a backup relatively simple to do within the browser interface, so little to no server access is needed.

Uploading the zipped course backup
(you can skip this step if the backup is one for the existing course you are in)
  1. Log in to Moodle and enter a course.
  2. Go to the Administration Pane and click on the course files:
  3. Click on the backupdata folder:
  4. Upload the zipped backup to the folder, clicking on “Upload a file,” then browse to find and select the backed up course file.

Restoring the course materials
  1. Click on the button in the Administration Pane
  2. Click on the Restore link to the right of the zipped backup
  3. Click continue on the “Do you want to continue?” screen
  4. Click continue on the description screen
  5. Set the parameters for where the materials will be used:
    1. Restore to a new course (creates a brand new course), existing course (either adding to data OR deleting & replacing current data), or current course (either adding to data OR deleting & replacing current data)
    2. Select the category for the course
    3. Set the short name (what shows up in the breadcrumb/navigation trail)
    4. Set the Full course name
    5. Set the course start date (this is very important if a course uses the calendar OR the weekly topic setup)
  6. If the course wants to bring in user data, I would consider hitting None to both speed up the process and set it to a blank course.  There are situations where you want some/all user data, though.
  7. Scroll to the bottom and hit Continue
    • If you selected that the course materials would go into an existing course, you will have to select it here.  Otherwise, you skip this step
  8. Click on “Restore this course now”
  9. Click Continue when Moodle has finished running the restore (this can take awhile)
  10.   You will be taken to the course where the material is now located.

If you created a new course, you will want to go to Assign Roles in the Administration Pane so that the course Teacher can be set.

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