Yes, I was thinking that as well. Start up my own backup procedures. There are many things possible. We could for example also shadow our complete installation. We already have backup software running for the webservers.
Lets say we have our production server, a copy of that server being one day old and a copy being one week old. Keep that state. If a teachers has lost a course (or valuable content in it) we can quickly backup the course from yesterday or the week before from the copies and restore it in production.
I think we also have Acronis (or something running) that can quite quickly make incremental backups.
As for course management, but that's a different subject, we abandoned year-course thinking as much as possible for multiple reasons:
- I think it is extremely outdated to run your educational programs from summer to summer in a 24/7 society. Students applying in oktober is being told to wait till september next year as the school year has already started... it's an outdated system. Our students get as much as possible the control over their own course of study. So multiple starting times and try to facilitate studying in own pace as much as possible.
- Copying courses per school year leads to lots of redundant data. We start around 2500 courses each year. Until 2020 these 2500 courses were being copied every summer. Imagine what happened when teachers tried to find work of a specific student that had his own pace. For example, it took that student 3 years in stead of 1 year to complete the course. But there were 3 exactly the same courses the student participated in.... horrible situation.
- Resetting a course is a no go. We have government checks all the time, audits from exam committees and test committees. All submitted material and all teacher's feedback needs to be kept for (I think) 7 years. This can be checked for years back, someone could ask 'hey, this student received a 7.4 for his work in 2018. Show me the test, the submitted work and the feedback.'
- There are many more reasons (like building up learning analytics for a course, etc.) to not have courses run for a year.
What we are trying to achieve: a course runs for as long as it needs to run. Every student has an individual start date, duration and end date of a course. If the course needs new material and new testing (for example based on student feedback), we create a new course with a new unique ID. If the same course continues next year, new students enter the same (old) course and are (if needed) automatically divided in Moodle groups and/or groupings within the same course). There's no need to copy the same course over and over again.
It's the one thing I never really liked about Moodle: the system is very course based. Every course looks like a single entity (for example: try to get a grade from activity in course A to the gradebook in course B, impossible)
An LMS should be more student based. Moodle has changed a lot towards that, but it's still not really there.
Also, Moodle seems to focus on smaller installations. Finally, but it took many years, the drop-down menu's seem to have gone. I have had drop down menu's in Moodle until Moodle version 4 that populated 20.000 items (for example cohorts was a notorious drop down menu until recently)
Well, enough about that I still have to see if I can either fix the auto-backup procedure in Moodle or bypass the whole thing with some own work arounds