About 6 months ago, I spent a lot of time creating a course for administrators on Moodle. I was under the impression that I’d get to use it with admins in my District but circumstances proved otherwise. However, that’s not what vexed me the most.

What drove me crazy was that after spending so much time working on it, I couldn’t backup the course to deploy elsewhere (such as on our Professional Learning Center). And, things being as busy as they were, I didn’t have time/make time to figure out why.

I suspected that the 154 megs of video files in the course resulted in a time out during the backup process. After numerous tries, I decided the only way was to make a backup of the entire Moodle installation onto my laptop, tweak the settings in the PHP.ini file to reflect maximum time for scripts and max size for everything else (e.g., 999megs for upload (grin)), delete extraneous garbage out of the Moodle install (users, data, etc) and get it done.

It didn’t work.

In desperation, I decided to try something I’d tried before but that hadn’t worked…removing the folder with the video files. Then, everything worked. The backup completed without incident. When I attempted to restore the course (with video files folder put back into the zip), the restore failed on “Unzipping.” I suspect there were other problems with the database tables, but thanks to PHPMyAdmin, I was able to take care of those issues.

Obviously, the size of the video files is the problem…so, I’ve taken the videos out and the resulting backup file for the Administrators’ Academy is 9.78 megs. Hardly anything at all…so when I share this with you, I’ll have to share it as two zipped files.

I hope to have it online soon for download!

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure