Course backup settings
- 25 Apr 2023
- 2 minutes to read
Course backup settings
- Updated on 25 Apr 2023
- 2 minutes to read
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Automated backup settings
When setting up automated course backups on your site there are a number of settings you can configure. These appear at the top of the Automated backup setup page. These should be configured to best suit your situation and it is recommend that backups are scheduled outside of core site usage hours.
| Setting | Description | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Active | You can choose how you want the backup to be run.
| - |
Schedule | Choose which days of the week you want to perform the backup. | - |
Execute at | Choose the time of the day the backup starts. | - |
Automated backup storage | Choose where to store the backup files. | - |
Save to | This is the where the backup will be saved, make sure you include the full folder path name. If you can, choose a backup path on another machine or on a different drive than the one Totara is on. You don’t want to lose your backups at the same time you lose your Totara site if the drive fails. If you leave the field blank, then backup ZIP files will be saved in the backup folder of each course files folder. | - |
Maximum number of backups kept | The number of backups for each courses to keep. Where the number is exceeded the oldest backup will be deleted. | - |
Delete backups older than | Include how old in days the backup can be before it is deleted. You can also select never so the old files are never deleted. | |
Maximum number of backups kept | If backups older than a specified number of days are deleted, it can happen that an inactive course ends up with no backup. To prevent this, a minimum number of backups kept should be specified. | |
Use course name in backup filename | Include the course short name as part of the backup filename. | |
Skip hidden courses | Choose whether to skip hidden courses (this includes audience based visibility). | |
Skip course not modified since | Specify the number of days where the course hasn't been modified and won't be backed up. | |
Skip courses not modified since previous backup | Choose whether to skip courses that have not been modified since the last automatic backup. This requires logging to be enabled. | - |
Recommended settings
It is possible to include or exclude the following data in the backup: users, role assignments, activities and resources, blocks, filters, comments, badges, users completion information, logs, history, question bank, and groups and groupings.
The backup page lets you set the types of content to be backed up. If you are running a nightly full-server backup (which is strongly recommended), we suggest you use the following settings:
- Include modules and module user data: Click both of these check boxes to preserve all learner work for each course
- Users: Set this to All - if you need to restore your Totara server from a backup, you don’t want to lose any accounts, even if they aren’t associated with a current course
- User files: Enable (check the box) to ensure the restored server looks as much like the original as possible by restoring all user files
- Course files: Enable this (check the box) to prevent learners needing to restore all of their course files after you restore the server
- Keep: This setting determines how many old backups will be saved - set this as high as you can without taking up too much space on your server
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