Hi Ken, thank you for the clarification. Indeed your reply has helped to explain the past two days performing tests, more tests and checking over log files.
I have checked the link you send me and admittedly from the title it appears to relate to restoring courses in a particular format but guess it is related.
The current selected course format is topics although to the right of this it says the default format is weekly. There are no add-on course formats that I know about, in fact I don't know what one is really.
Upgrading is something that I have already been looking into as I'm aware the version is fast becoming outdated. I have previously tried this but made the mistake of using the copy / paste method, trying to overwrite the old moodle directory with the new one and it complained about having two significant versions of Moodle running at the same time. After some research I discovered that best practice is actually to start from fresh, install the latest set of moodle files and then add any additional blocks to this moodle install so that everything remains compatible. The issue with this is that because we are in a school environment in the UK we are running a third pary block that allows for Moodle to connect to our school course management system (Eportal / CMIS if you have ever heard of this) which displays all the course available to students within Moodle. I am okay installing the new version (was 2.3 but it now 2.4) but there is a configuration issue on our side involving this third party block which is preventing me so far.
Out of curiosity our institute has also got another instance of Moodle setup which has just been upgraded from 2.3 to 2.4 but I tried the same automated backup test yesterday on this and it produced the same result, newly created course skipping? I didn't attempt a manual backup yesterday but have just tried this and it was successful. The setting for courses in this install is weekly, the same as the default.
I mention this as your previously reply indicates two possible reasons for failure, one being the moodle version and the other the format of the course display? If on version four the manual backup works and courses are wet as default to weekly I would have expected automated backups to also work?
Thank you for being very informative, it really is appreciated.
Michael