Greetings,
We are finally potentially planning to move some of our older courses after archiving and we are managed hosted after several years.
I know that in Office Hours some have mentioned their experiences before and after this process.
If folks can post here or DM me on possible concerns or after the fact experiences they have had, that would be great.
Some of the issues I have concerns with thus far include:
Course copies that route from older courses
Links to older content if found as embedded
Restore issues in the future for large courses archived
Retrieving data on older courses for planning (less of issue but still a concern)
Let me know what you thoughts are on this process that have made it to the other side.
Cheers,
Toni P.
Hi Toni:
We only keep 4 semesters worth of courses on the server: current and 3 previous semesters. There are often more than that due to overlap between new semester course creation and when I actually delete the courses. We are Managed Hosted so storage space is a concern. I'm kind of a watchdog when it comes to course file duplication and getting rid of unused and non-linked files in courses. (like those wonderful times when the instructor copies his class more than once!!)
I delete the courses via the GUI > System Admin tab > Courses. When MH changed the process of deleting courses by changing the DSK and sending me to the Data Sources to delete the courses which left orphan content and then painstaking having to clean up the orphan content that was generated from that, the 1 day it takes to delete via Courses is far less time consuming. We took the stance that if a live course is linking back to an old file/course, the link needs to be updated in the current course. Generally speaking we haven't had any issues with that. I will say that we have only had Content Collection since the beginning of this year so we haven't really made use of placing files there and then linking them to multiple classes.
We have had A LOT of clean up issues since our initial migration from WebCT 4.1 to 9.0 to 9.1. It has taken me the better part of 5 years to clean up the storage mess from all of it mainly because of the significant amount of time it took to clean up 1 course from the extraneous duplication of files.
Our process:
It might not be the best way to maintain courses. I do have archives on external hard drives. I have never deleted any of the old course archives. I still have old WebCT courses on CDs from 2000!
I don't know if that helped. I'm curious about the procedures others have regarding course archives and deletion.
Annette