I have looked on Blackboard's website to find out how items are stored in a course. We seem to be using more storage and I want to see what is the best way to make courses streamline and smaller on our system. The first place I looked was Disk Usage to see which courses were large and what can be done about it. From the disk usage, there are three areas that files can be stored.
1. Course Files
2. Protected Files
3. Legacy Filesystem
Course files are the easiest to know as they are just files that instructors place into the course. Protected Files holds anything that is related to the student. I don't understand the "Legacy Filesystem". This is what Blackboard has to say:
Best Practice: Limit Course Size | Blackboard Help
I have also heard that "messages" go in here. The reason I ask is that we have some very large space being used for legacy files.
I thought I would check to see if messages are stored in the legacy filesystem by looking at courses that would not have used messages. We create Master courses where only content is kept and then copied to the "real" course. The Master course should never have anything student related. One such course has 1GB of space used in the legacy filesystem... Why?
If anyone could help me understand how this works it would help me with our courses.
Do you have the Content Management module in the System Admin? If so you can go into there and look in the /internal/courses directory for files that are part of the "Legacy". Looking at the directories that get created it looks like it may include content uploaded to discussion boards, grade book, announcements, as well as others like messages, which we do not use.