Hi all,
This one’s a little more on the techie side of things than my usual posts. As many of you know one of the proposed changes for Moodle in the 2.1 release at the end of June is the addition of a legacy backup restore function. Currently, Moodle 2.0.x will not restore a 1.9 backup file. Playing around this weekend I found a managable solution to this. Here are the steps.
- Download and install a copy of the Mac (in my case) or PC versions of Moodle 1.9.x.
- As admin, restore all of your old 1.9.x backup files into new courses.
- Download the zip version of Moodle 2.x from the main download directory and unzip.
- Copy all files from the 2.x moodle directory into the htdocs/moodle directory of your desktop version.
- Browse to http://localhost/moodle and login as admin.
At this point you will be prompted to upgrade. Say yes. If you use 3rd party modules as we do, you may encounter places where you are told that they are not compatible with 2.x. If that happens you will need to either delete these or upgrade them in your htdocs/moodle/mod directory – then press continue in your web browser.
Ultimately the upgrade will finish. Just run a system backup and presto – out will pop the Moodle 2.x .mbz backup files. Just upload these back to your object repository for use on the production server.
Let me know if you have questions, but this trick worked for me, and really didn’t take much time. (In reality you could do this on your production server, but make sure to back it up first!)
Cheers,
Doug
