Periodic restore of DB and course

Practice disaster recovery.

Both the DB and the courses in my moodle 2.2 instance are automatically backed up each night. I am prepared in the event of an intrusion or crash. I feel even more prepared when I periodically test the backups by restoring them and seeing them work as expected.

Restore the DB

I restored my DB, which is now about 33 MB, using phpMyAdmin. The Import of the backup script took about 15 records. I logged into the moodle site, looked around, loaded a course, browsed the user accounts, checked my blocks.

Restore a course

To restore a course backup, I needed to be browsing the site from the server, so when choosing Restore and browsing to a backupfile, I would be browsing the server where the files exist. Also, I had to look at the id# for the course I was restoring, since the moodle 2.2 file naming schema does not include the course name, but the id. Like this:

backup-moodle2-course-5-20120405-1503.mbz

I choose to restore the file into an existing course.

Moral of the story?

Be sure you can restore dbs and courses and that they restore without issue.

Practice disaster recovery.