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Español[Answered] Course backup
Hello,
For quit a long time I have been searching for a possibility to do a complete (!) backup of a course.
When I do a backup now, documents are backed up, but for instance fora and goups are not backed up...
I am aware that I can make a database backup using PHPmySQL, but I want the enduser to make backups.
Anyone a suggestion?
Thanks in advance!
John Baijens.
Comments
Hi John, This has historical
Hi John,
This has historical reasons. The course backup was originally a course "copy" and was intended to provide an easy way to copy *contents* from one course to another (avoiding manual and repetitive operations). With time, people started to use forums, groups and all these user interaction tools a lot more and the necessity appeared to backup the whole stuff.
This, however, leads to several high-level technical problems, like for example the fact that the format proposed should work even if you copy it from one Chamilo portal to another (thus possibly not having the same user base, thus loosing links to what belongs to whom). Another problem is that all those resources have creation dates and records stored with time and user references, and a user might have different permissions in one course than in another, or users can even be deleted and replaced by others with the same login between a backup generation and its recovery.
All these cases lead to extremely complex choices, that no institution/organization has had the intention to cover financially so far.
The phpMyAdmin backup is not an acceptable solution, given the course database does not include the users list, so you would still need to export parts of the main database and the tracking database to get a functional import.
The kind of costs it would represent to develop this are prohibitive for most (when discussing only one feature), but this is what it really costs developing. We are working hard to provide an association structure that allows several organizations to contribute together to a single helpful feature, but this is not ready yet (should be around December). Each new version of Chamilo has a total worth of between 10K€ and 100K€, so you get the picture of how important external contributions (financial or technical) are to the association...
And clearly, we are interested in including that code if your organization is able to provide it (as much as you currently benefit from a lot of code that has been contributed that way).
If you want to discuss pro development, get in touch through my contact form.
I hope this answered your doubts about the feature.
Regards,
Yannick (development leader for Chamilo 1.8)