Hi all,
I run a number of Moodle servers (3.9 and up) and occasionally run into an issue where I want to stop automated course backups while they are in progress.
Here's a likely scenario where I might want to do this:
At the beginning of term, a large number of courses are suddenly changed and Moodle's nightly backups kick off as usual. Due to the volume of course changes, the backups are larger than expected and risk filling the server's filesystem as the job continues. I need to add more space, but before I can do that I need to stop or pause the backups-in-progress so the server's disk doesn't fill. (Yes, I *can* add space with the server online as it's a VM, but sometimes I don't have the time before the disk fills).
Things that I've tried in the past that don't work:
- Killing the relevant php task from the command line.
- Switching Automated backups to disabled in Site Admin -> Courses -> Backups -> Automated Backup Setup and *then* killing the in-progress PHP task.
- Disabling the scheduled Automated Backups task in Site Admin -> Server -> Tasks -> Scheduled Tasks and *then* killing the in-progress PHP task.
- Doing steps 2 and 3 simultaneously and then killing the in-progress PHP task.
In all instances, regardless of the 2 settings above, on the next run of cron.php Moodle will kick off a backup task and continue where it left off.
There is not an obvious way in which to tell Moodle to go away and *not* continue running the automated backups at this moment in time. It used to be (many moons ago in Moodle 2.x) that step #2 above would do the trick. But not any longer.
I would appreciate any suggestions or useful workarounds to bypass Moodle's backup tenacity. My other thought is that I could just write a moosh script to do what I want, and I'm fine with that - but it would be great if in addition to scheduling tasks in Moodle, there was a way to *manage* them.
Thx!