Development:Backup 2.0

Note: This page is a work-in-progress. Feedback and suggested improvements are welcome. Please join the discussion on moodle.org or use the page comments.

Summary & Objectives

The backup & restore functionality has been present since Moodle 1.1 (29 August 2003, more than six years ago!) and, although it has been continuously improved and renewed, the core has remained basically the same.

Many things have evolved since then both in Moodle and PHP-land so this project is an attempt to rework the backup & restore functionality in order to achieve these goals:

• Modernise the code base, using actual PHP/DB techniques: OOP, exceptions, temporary DB tables, transactions... aiming to reduce the current "spaghetti code" in various places.
• Unify current developments, so all backup alternatives (manual, export, silent, scheduled...) will be executed by the same code base (also for restore/import of course).
• Improve the process, making it more reliable, being able to pre-detect wrong situations, rollback (if possible) to previous states, and apply any possible benefit both for speed (some interim in-memory caches) and memory (better parsing techniques).
• Improve Security, so the Moodle permissions structure will be 100% respected and any user data disclosure will be avoided, of course, whilst giving the admins the flexibility to change default behaviours by configuring them in a standard way.
• New features requested from the Community will be added. Things like fine grained control of various restore parts, the ability to backup not only course structures, but sections or individual activities, anonymised backups and so on will début with Moodle 2.0. See the requirements section for more info.

Implementation plan

META bug in the Tracker: MDL-21432