A day when my automated course backups saved the day

One of our moodle courses was accidently removed from the server..  We have a vendor who is being phased out and we were removing some of their courses from the server.  It looks like one of their courses that had a real student enrolled in it was dumped too.   Normally, a course with an enrollment will always be backed up PRIOR to being removed.  Since this was an accident, there was no backup of the course with the students data.

The mistake was brought to our attention by the teacher contacting my customer saying that her student emailed her and said he could no longer get to his course.  The teacher verified that the course was also gone.  The student had been enrolled about a month and had completed about 1/2 the course.

Needless to say, if I could not recover the course and specifically the students progress, it would be a problem for me.

This is where the automated course backups came into play. 

 I was able to reduce approx. the ID of the course and found the matching id in the course backup list (I cant use course names in the automated backups in moodle 2.2 - it does not work), using course ids does work. 

There was a backup of the course only a couple days old.  I was able to *guess at the course and restore it.  The teacher and student were both enrolled in it.

Moral of the story?

1 - don't delete courses that have active enrollments in them
2 - use automated course backup schema, it could save your hide in a pinch.