Re: Backup Large Course - work-around? ...

Actually, since there are so many big courses, I find it interesting to automate this task of building manually target zips that, from command line they are built correctly, but that from PHP script doesn't.

I have a solaris system in the server. I have built this script to help me. Hoping it may be of your interest:

<?php

define('CLI_SCRIPT', true);

require_once 'config.php';

ini_set('display_errors', true);
ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL | E_STRICT);

global $CFG, $DB;

$nonzipped = array();

$modtimecommand = 'perl -MPOSIX -le \'print strftime "%Y%m%d%H%M", localtime((lstat)[9]) for @ARGV\' ';
exec('grep -l error ' . $CFG->dataroot . '/temp/backup/*.log', $nonzipped);

$backupdir = (isset($CFG->backup_auto_destination)) 
    ? $CFG->backup_auto_destination
    : get_config('backup', 'backup_auto_destination');

foreach ($nonzipped as $i => $logfile) {
    $dir = substr($logfile, 0, strpos($logfile, '.'));
    echo '### Processing unfinished backup course directory: ' . $dir . PHP_EOL;
    $xmlfile = $dir . '/moodle_backup.xml';
    $xml = simplexml_load_file($xmlfile);
    if ($xml === false) {
        echo '*** Could not load xml file: ' . $xmlfile . PHP_EOL;
        continue;
    }
    $targetzip = $backupdir . '/' . $xml->information->name;
    if (file_exists($targetzip)) {
        $zipmodtime = filemtime($targetzip);
        if ($zipmodtime === false) {
            $zipmodtime = exec($modtimecommand . $targetzip);
            $dirmodtime = exec($modtimecommand . $dir . '/.');
        } else {
            $dirmodtime = filemtime($dir . '/.');
        }
        if ((int)$zipmodtime > (int)$dirmodtime) {
            echo '*** Skipping. Zip is up-to-date: ' . $targetzip . PHP_EOL;
            continue;
        }
    }
    $command = 'cd ' . $dir . ' && time zip -r ' . $targetzip . ' *';
    echo '===> Running command: ' . $command . PHP_EOL;
    passthru($command);
}

exit(0);

There are some tricks over there:

1. The $modtimecommand is useful to get the modification time from a file when it is so big that the filemtime does not work properly (and returns false).
2. Using the passthru, instead of an exec, we get the standard output from the command out into our php script.
3. I use this script, namely like post-automated-backups.php in the MOODLE HOME like this: time php post-automated-backups.php | tee post-automated-backups.log. This way we get the total spent time for executing all this at once.

Probably you can build your own automated_backup.php script to just run:

1. the admin/cli/automated_backups.php script, and
2. this post-automated-backups.php script, to complete unfinished zips.

Hoping this helps!

Jordi