Daily course level backup system
From Syscore
Blackboard daily course backup system
There is a need to have a way of backing up and restoring individual courses/communities without attempting a full blackboard server reload.
Hence our “daily auto archiver” This runs each night via the tasks scheduler, and keeps two or three days of compressed course backups available for restore. These in turn are backed up by networker, when it is working.
On the production file server Currently on the F: drive (subject to change soon) Under /archive/export-nightly exists several directories.
./backup ./old_backups ./oldold_backups
Each of these contains archives of the active* courses on the system. “Backup” is the most recent copy. Old_backups is from the day before. Oldold_backup is the day before that but this has not yet been implemented.
Note: A Blackboard course archive is really just a special zip file. They look like this:
backupArchiveFile_oit.zip (oits community
backupArchiveFile_HIST306_0101_SP2007.zip (History 306 course)
In the “work” directory we have several files and scripts
Run_export.cmd is the “cmd “ that is run by the task scheduler. It, in turn
runs export.pl which does the following.
-Reads courselist.txt. This is the list of “active” courses to archive
-Generates clistfeeder.txt. This is a file of courses and directories in the format needed by blackboards scripts.
-“Feeds” clistfeeder into the blackboard supplied archiver script, which is
\Blackboard\apps\content-exchange\bin\batch\ImportExport.bat
Courselist.txt is generated by a sql query. Currently, this is run manually. Making it automatic and part of export.pl is pending some irritating stuff I have yet to figure out how to do within MSSQL.
Here is the latest sql code for getting just the “inuse” courses. 5/21/2007
use bb_bb60 select course_id from course_main where (available_ind = 'Y' ) and ((duration = 'C') or ((duration = 'R') and DTCREATED >= '10/1/2006'))
DTCREATED gets changed to reflect when the current semesters courses were generated.
