Restoring courses to access student grades

My customer emailed me today stating that he needed to see a student, who took 4 courses last year, grades.  Someone needs NCAA eligibility or something.  This allowed me to briefly review our process of course completion, backup, storage of backup files, restoration of backed up files, location of etc.

In a nutshell, this is our process.

A student completes or drops a course, we change their enrollment status in their course.  Their enrollment stays in the course (because un-enrolling an account from a course is a terrible idea if you want to see the student progress).  Twice a year, around January and again in June, we back up a course (with student data included) then move the backup file to a shared server, then we delete the course from the moodle site.

This process works pretty well and allows us to be organized in terms of when we backup, where we put the backup files and when we delete courses from the site.

On our shared drive, we have a folder called 2013_14 StudentdataBackups.  We name the backups using the course name, like this.

I created a temporary category called Restored, and restored each of the courses into it.  This made it easier for my customer to find them.  I also asked my customer to delete the courses and category once he had retrieved what he needed.

I browsed to a random course to start, then clicked the restore icon in the Course Admin block browsed to the share drive and uploaded the backup file, then restored it to the Restored category.







The restore process asks where you want to restore to, I choose the Restored category.  I repeated this process for each course.

It took about 30 minutes to restore the courses to the moodle site so my customer could see the students grade data.  Most of the time was spent waiting for the course to complete the restore process.  The process itself was clear and efficient.


Who says process does not matter!  I used to think that when I was young and foolish. ;)