by Tammy Moore.
Here is an update -
One thing we suspected was involved in the issue was the large number of quizzes (150 to 180) and the large quiz bank (smallest math course had over 5000 questions with some math courses having over 7000).
So one of the avenues of testing has been to keep trimming down the size to see if we could then get a successful copy. Today we literally got our very first successful restore to a new course copy for any of our math courses. It was a quarter the number of weeks of the original and only 2100 questions including labels.
So now we are getting a sense of the top end of the question bank size. We are disappointed that Moodle 2 (or maybe still some server setting) has capped our courses down so tight to having to work in course quarters, but a step forward in this issue we have battled for 6 weeks is a cause to celebrate.
We also went ahead and moved the server to the next tier up with full host server support and I moved us from 16 GB RAM to 32. They did a server optimization and that immediately moved one of the courses that we couldn't back up into successfully backing up. Though that was a full course copy and it did not restore. All the backups did speed up. Whereas we did have a few that would take close to an hour to backup before, now the longest we wait is ten minutes (of the ones that do work).
So in this chapter of what feels like a novel length adventure, ends with some progress toward the goal of getting past the math course gremlin. We still have a ways to go yet, but there is some faint glint of light from the end of the tunnel.