Hi Ken, the information about CMIS was just to provide background details about why I've not upgraded Moodle to version 2.3 just yet. The add-on itself isn't used for authentication (it is used to retrieve course information) but it does run in conjunction with LDAP, so as you correctly point out, the user accounts are not stored locally.
My query "correlation is between my environment, the problem being experienced and your diagnosis post above?'" relates to the association between: -
the link that you provided me which makes reference to the error mesage that I initially posted,
the questions that you asked i.e. course default setting whether weekly or topics,
the inability for Moodle to perform automatic backups and how all of this fits together i.e. you identified that the error message from my manual backup attempt was also the reason why auto backups didn't work either. How does the link join all these parts together? Is there a bug when wanting to backup courses with specific fornat setting on my version etc?
Thank you,
Michael