VLE Moodle backups

[ozydave]

We have a Moodle VLE setup and is starting to become more widely used. It is hosted by our LEA (Atomwide). Who are pushing the VLE thing!
I am concerned about the backups. As it grows in popularity more students are required to submit their course work.
As this course work goes towards the final exam marks it needs to kept in case of appeals. So it’s not only for the time they can appeal it is also during the years running up to the marking for the exams, possibly 3 years or more.
The problem I see coming is the LEA only do a full database backup and only keep two weeks worth.
1. Should a course be deleted by mistake and not noticed for 2 ½ weeks that course is lost forever and all the course work submissions.
2. If the course is deleted and noticed within the 2 weeks the LEA can only do a full a full restore on the VLE, which will delete all submissions in all the other courses.

Yes we can ask teachers / course creators to do regular backups of there own courses and download them to a local drive but this will get forgotten or just not done. (Teacher being teaches and all)
I know that you can have an AUP stating that students are responsible for keeping copies of all work submitted, but it will still come back to the school keeping records.
I do not fancy going into 70 odd courses creating a backup and then downloading them to a local drive
I have asked the LEA to allow me to download one of there backups once a week which I could then restore to a server running moodle which I could then extract the needed course/ user data, but they did not go for that.
How does anybody else handle the backups?
Does anybody else have a helpful LEA. The LEA contract the services of Atomwide to provide schools with Internet and other services so in effect they are working for the school so should try to help us But……

[strawberry]

our courses back up twice a week, our server once a week. We keep course 100 couse backups (a year) and replace the server backup weekly.

[CyberNerd]

Scheduled backups should back up all courses anyway. manual backups do not

[ozydave]

The scheduled backup are good but they only store the backup within the course.
Does that make sense?
So course A has a scheduled backup that stores the backup with course A. If course A was deleted then the backups are deleted. I am then back to the LEA restoring the entire database.
Not the best solution. I now you can set the scheduled backup path but again the LEA will not give me a path to backup to

Cheers

[Geoff]

Not if you symlink your course backup folders elsewhere

[ozydave]

What is symlink?

Is it a moodle module

I cannot install any modules myself.

Cheers
Dave

[jamesss]

The individual course backups are the most important - they can be restored to another moodle site. We have the moodle standard backup which runs three times a week into a designated folder. These are automatically deleted by moodle's cronjob when the number of backups for each course exceeds 3 (so there are always a week's worth of backups on the main server). The secondary server keeps a copy of this folder using rsync but does not delete the backups which are deleted from the folder on the main server - a shell script then deletes the backups which are over 90 days old.

We also have backup routines for the database and the entire primary server. The secondary server takes a weekly fully working copy of the primary server (with some of the config modified by a couple of perl scripts) as failover.

The filesystem/db are also copied onto NAS and then tapes on a weekly basis.

I like to think this gives us some room for failure but I'd still be annoyed by the inconvenience if any of it failed so the main server is on a RAID5 array. Fingers crossed...