Creating shared course backups

One of the common tasks for us each year is the preparation, formatting and distribution of 3rd party courses.  This year, we have 5 commercial vendors who whose course content we are using.  I contact someone on their side and they will either give me access to their FTP server, where I can download or I will set up an account and categories in our moodle and allow them to upload directly to our server.

Once we have get the courses, I run a bunch of MySQL scripts on the courses to do things like

set the quiz length and number of attemps
set the course start date
set the gradebook decimal display
set the behavior of course URLs - this year it is to the frame option.
etc....

Once we are done with the course formatting, we back the course up, creating a .mbz file that we use to deploy a section or version of the course into an active teacher directory.

There are two of use who restore course backups into active teacher directories, so we had to come up with a way to *share the space of the backup files.  In other words, each of us needs to be able to look in a common spot to see if a course has been backup and if not to create a backup while keeping only a single version of the backup file.  This is important, because we do not want multiple course backups confusing the scenario when a course is requested.

We thought about moving the backup files from the moodle server to a common shared location on our Novell network, but that is not efficient.  Upon further review, we created a new moodle account called backupmaster, and share it.  When ever one of us if looking to see if a course backup exists or have to restore a backup file to create a new section, we log into our shared account, which has its own personal area where file backups are created.

I also added an html block to the home page of backupMaster account with a link to the backup directory created by the account!

The backup list looks like this:

Now, either myself or my colleague can log into our moodle instance, using the shared account and have a complete list of course backups that we can Restore when necessary.