by Tim Hunt.
How would admins control this? What I mean is, I don't see what the user-interface for doing this would look like.
At the back end, it is quite easy to write code to make Moodle back things up and restore them. There is example code at http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Backup_2.0_for_developers#Setting_up_the_environment and http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Restore_2.0_for_developers#Automatically_triggering_restore_in_code