Automated course backup

Location: Administration > Courses > Backups

The backup configuration page enables administrators to configure automated course backups and a backup schedule.

Course versus site backups

Course backups are more expensive in terms of time and CPU usage. The recovery time to have your site running again is longer.
Course backups are useful for obtaining "fresh" copies of courses to be re-used or distributed individually, however they should never be used as a primary backup system (unless your hosting doesn't allow the preferred site backups).
In order to make scheduled course backups, you have to setup CRON to run periodically. Have a look at Set up cron for details.
Site backups, as explained in upgrading Moodle, are recommended in order to have all data saved with the best confidence and the shorter recovery time.

From 1.6 onwards, course backups automatically skip courses which are unavailable to students AND have not been changed in the last month.