Moodle Administrators – Free Up your server space by automatically clearing backup files

Moodle LMS is the most flexible and customizable learning management system in the world with more than 420 million users. With such vast amount of users, it is pretty obvious for all Moodle administrators to keep a backup of their Moodle site at regular intervals.

Moodle LMS also offers different backup mechanisms such as complete site backup at server level, course backup, activity backup etc. We assume that if you are a server admin managing your Moodle LMS on server, you should be having a sufficient knowledge about the complete site backup. In this post we will see how you can manage the course backups & activity backup files in your Moodle.

The Course backup in Moodle allows the course creators to take a backup of their course for safe keeping. It also allows you to take a backup of an activity/activities from a course and then restore them in another course on same Moodle or another Moodle instance.

Over a period of time, there might be many backup files created on your Moodle site which will be taking up the precious server space. You need to periodically delete these backup files to keep the server space clear.

This is especially where the ‘Clear Backup Files’ plugin comes in handy. This admin tool clears all backup files from the server. It is useful for freeing up space from dev and test servers once they are refreshed from production.

You can download the ‘Clear Backup Files’ plugin from the official plugins repository here. Once installed, you can delete the backup files from /admin/tool/clearbackupfiles/index.php and after deleting you can find logs at /report/log/index.php.

In earlier version of the plugin, there were a few bugs reported by some users. So, I request you to please use this plugin at your own risk and after enough testing.

What are the other useful Moodle plugins you are using, Please let us know in the comments section below.

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