I manage a large Moodle site (~3,000-5,000) active courses. Our Moodle is also dynamically "fed" by our CRM so we have another 12,000-16,000 "empty" Moodle courses created by this feed. This feed is a critical business process and we can't change anything on that side of things. Also disk space on the production server is not really an issue, and the empty courses don't really take much space, even in those quantities.
Up until recently we have been using automated backups as configured from the application front-end. However, a feature that is sorely lacking is the ability to specify only those categories which we want backed up. We don't need to back up the categories with the empty shells, only the active semester categories. It takes a great deal of time for the process to iterate through the empty courses, even if they are just being skipped after initial backup - although the empty courses are still taking up backup space which is more finite.
I've read recently about setting automated backups to run manually which requires being executed command line. I'm fine with this, we can simply set up another cron to do this. I'm wondering if anyone has tried this and if running the automated backups manually would give us the more granular control to only backup specific categories.
Thanks in advance for any insight or advice!
Bobby