by Emma Richardson.
Ok, that makes a lot of sense now. And that will clean up a lot of data. The problem is that moodle creates unique file links for all files and they are going to be different on the new server so your aliases are not going to work. So the only way you can take that approach is if you are willing to manually update all the aliases to the new files (which of course could take hours or days or weeks!!).
Another approach might be to migrate the whole site over to the new server (that will clean up server stuff at least) and then work on cleaning up the database and old files and courses...sometimes you can get rid of the missing from disk by putting the plugin folder back in the right location and then deleting it from the plugins - that should clean up the db entries that are still referencing the old plugin. You might need to manually remove the folder again afterwards. You could also search the database for references to those plugins and manually remove the entries but of course, BACKUP first as this might inadvertently break something!
Another option might be move the files to somewhere like Google drive and then just use Google links - this is not going to save you anytime but in the future if you needed/wanted to do this again, at least your file references would be static.
Another approach might be to migrate the whole site over to the new server (that will clean up server stuff at least) and then work on cleaning up the database and old files and courses...sometimes you can get rid of the missing from disk by putting the plugin folder back in the right location and then deleting it from the plugins - that should clean up the db entries that are still referencing the old plugin. You might need to manually remove the folder again afterwards. You could also search the database for references to those plugins and manually remove the entries but of course, BACKUP first as this might inadvertently break something!
Another option might be move the files to somewhere like Google drive and then just use Google links - this is not going to save you anytime but in the future if you needed/wanted to do this again, at least your file references would be static.