Fixing the error/wrong_setting_level_moodle_backup_xml_file message

I got a moodle back up file from our good friends at North Carolin Virtual Public Schools, I think it was a course they created with federal money, so they have to share it with our schools districts around the country!  Good idea huh?

The details of making getting the course and installing it on this side fall to me.  Fortunalty they are using Moodle 2.3 as their LMS.  Our moodle instance is 2.2, I was not sure how it was going to go.

Once I got the .mbz file from Dropbox, I set off to restore it on one of our 2.3 test instances first.  When I restored the file, I got this error message indicating a problem with a plugin or something out of the normal moodle setup.

error/wrong_setting_level_moodle_backup_xml_file

 - with a link to this moodle doc page.

I followed the instructions in the doc page and opened the .mbz file using 7zip.  I was able to de-compress the file and extract the files.  which was about 13000 lines long and scrolled through the file looking for anything other than I opened the moodle_backup.xml file,root, course, activity and section.  At the very end of the file was the culprit.  A value of 'local' between the level tags.  I commented out the two blocks in the file and save it then created a new .zip file, since 7zip cant make a .mbz format.  I went to the root of the folder where I exstracted the files and highlighed all the folders and files and told  zip to make a new .zip file.

I then went to moodle and uploaded the new .zip file and it complained with this error message

error/moodle/xml parsing error.  

I opened the moodle_backup.xml file again,  and realized I removed the closing settings tag, which caused the error.

After repeating the process of creating another .zip file, I uploaded the file again to moodle, but this time, no error message.  I was greeted with step 1 of the restore process.

I followed the rest of the restore process and was successful!

Moral of the story?

People install things in their moodle installations that are not *standard and can cause problems while trying to restore to other instances.  You CAN un-compress a .mbz file and edit the contents and rezip the updated files and use it as the restore file.  Go figure.