Ken, over night I thought about two things:
a) as recovery is so much more complicated with Moodle 2, I wonder if we should not ask for facilities to introduce into the Moodle-Admin-Block. E.g. UN-delete course xy. UN-delete user xy. UN-delete section xy in course zz. UN-delete everything you could delete inside a course. This would imply that the DB-designers of Moodle should really never delete anything out of the DB, but only mark it for deletion without overwriting anything in those records. To not let the DB grow a purge-job could be set up to purge things not recovered in the last 6 or 12 months or so. Such UN-delete functions should be available also to the teachers, so as to let them manage their own courses. One MAJOR problem though: should only ONE record be recoverable or should there be sort of a history? I would say, to start, only ONE record is ever recoverable. E.g. you could incidentally delete one user from a course or some sections or some activities, etc. and you would be able to recover/undelete them once. To recover a whole course you can always resort to the previous course-backup files, also on Tapes. So UN-deleting a course should also imply undeleting the course-backup-files.
b) Moodle has a very good installation script. This script should include RECOVER FROM EXISTING MOODLE site or Database. This would automate recovering from a DB dump. I hope everybody does DB-dumps and backs them up to tape as I did with Moodle 1.9 including the MoodleDataDir of course. This way you could even, not only install from an existing dump and data-dir, you could also UPgrade from an existing Moodle site. I think most of the code is already in the installation script. Automating with such a script would free us server-admins from doing it all by hand: - restore server - import dump into the database - restore MoodleDataDir - restore MoodlePHPcode - if necessary edit Moodle's config.php - hope you did not forget anything and the dump is consistent - cross your fingers, etc. etc. - automating means less risk, less stress, less downtime, as you do not have to reinvent the wheel searching for manuals and how-Tos. There are other posts where I described how to backup Moodle sites and how to recover or how to migrate the whole Moodle site from one hardware to a new one, as I did this at least three times in the years from 2004 to 2012.
Rosario