How-To: Backup your Moodle courses for off-line storage

From time to time, the need may arise for you to make a backup copy of one or more of your Moodle courses. This may be because:

• You want the additional security of a copy stored off-line
• You're leaving the college, and wish to take your course materials with you
• You're creating a new course based on an older course and want to import the older materials as a starting point

 This guide will show you how to create a backup of any Moodle course, and then download it for off-line storage, transfer, or reimport.

1. First, log into Moodle, open your dashboard as usual, and click the link for the course you wish to back up.
2. In the title block of the course page, click the gear icon to open the Actions menu.
   
3. From the Actions menu, select Backup.
4. On the Initial settings page, select the Backup settings you want. Mostly, the defaults are fine, but do make sure you uncheck Include enrolled users (depending on your course configuration, this option may not even be available, but do verify).
5. Click Next.
6. Under Schema settings, deselect any content do not want to backup, and make sure all the content you want in the backup is checked.
7. Click Next.
8. Under Confirmation and review, you can either accept the default filename for your backup, or create a custom filename. Scroll down the list of information to be included in were excluded from the backup and verify that it is correct. If any changes are required, skip back to the appropriate page using the Previous button and make corrections. Once you've verified that all the correct information is included or excluded, click Perform backup.
9. The backup will execute, and report success when complete.
   
10.  Click Continue.
11. On the Restore course page, look for the third block, labeled User private backup area. The course she just created a backup of should be listed at the top of this column. To download a copy for off-line storage, click Download next to the file name. To restore the course content into the shell of another existing course for use as a starting point, click Restore.
    
    •  Downloaded backup files will be in the .MBZ format, which can be restored into any other Moodle installation running the same version or later of Moodle.
    • If you need to access the course content directly (in raw XML format), change the MBZ extension to ZIP and decompress the file.
12. To restore the file, see separate instructions for course restoration.