by Ken Task.
I'll venture a guess due to an experience helping on Site Admin having serious issues with space that eventually led to crashing the DB ... Admin set autobackups to keep all ... never rotate ... never delete. Ran out of space in short order ... a couple of months time. Never checked the status of backups nor how much space was remaining ... until too late.
Maybe limiting the number of autobackups will prevent the 'perfect storm' ... iF allowed type in a number ... and one makes a boo-boo ... meant to type in 100 and opps, typed 1000 (if the box accepted that number of characters/digits) just how much space would be required for 1000 such backups that by default, goes to moodledata/filedir/? Should one need to find some disk space in a hurry ... running out of space ... Admin would have to go to each course to see the number of autobackups and remove. There is no Admin tool that would make that easier.
Besides that, one has to wonder ... why does one need to keep over X backups of courses?
Might understand active courses that change every week .... but if that course is 90Gig + then?
If the purpose is archival of old courses .... seems to me those should be downloaded ... and the old/no longer used course removed from Moodle. (that's pref of course)
'spirit of sharing', Ken