Mastodawn

**Moodle backups to external location**

TL;DR

Backuping Moodle1 server to external location requires some gymnastics and the setup is not straight forward. There are plugins that can backup using FTP2, but I didn’t explore them.

What I wanted to accomplish was 1. firstly, moving course backups out of Moodle’s strange file structure and 2. backuping them to external server (Koofr via rclone). Simply put:

Moodle filearea –> /var/backups –rclone–> Koofr

Courses backup is the second backup strategy I’m using. The first one is a daily backup of a virtual server from a proxmox host to NAS via NFS.

1. Set Moodle’s automated backup location (same server)

Firstly, I had to convince Moodle to store backups of courses in my folder.

Moodle -> Site Admin / Courses / Backup / Automated backup setup

Automated backup storage setting is set to Course backup filearea by default. Moodle’s filearea is accessible (in /moodledata/), but the naming of folders and files is … unfriendly to put it mildly and I can’t make any of it. Take a look:

I wanted to change it to ‘Course backup filearea and the specified directory‘. But I couldn’t, because my Moodle install does not allow manually setting paths from admin UI (it’s a security setting). I didn’t want to circumvent it ($CFG->preventexecpath = true; in config.php).

So I had to set the backup path in Moodle’s config.php. Firstly, I couldn’t find how to set it, then I found it in one forum post3.

But firstly, I created a directory where I want my backups and allowed that user www-data (apache server) can write to it:

mkdir /var/moodlebackups
chown www-data:www-data /var/moodlebackups
chmod 750 /var/moodlebackups

Then I modified Moodle’s config.php and added the location4:

$CFG->forced_plugin_settings['backup']['backup_auto_destination'] = '/var/moodlebackups';

Went back to Moodle’s admin UI, refreshed and I could see the backup location:

Finally I could set Automated backup storage to Course backup filearea and the specified directory.

2. Backup to remote location using rclone and Koofr5

Now that I convinced Moodle to spit out backups of courses to the location I wanted, I proceeded with:

1. Install and configure rclone (a program to copy/sync files to variety of cloud services)

apt install rclone
rclone config

To configure rclone, I just followed these instructions.

2. I made a new folder in my Koofr for Moodle backups and tested the connection:

List Koofr dirs:

rclone lsd koofr:Backups/Moodle

Test copying from local folder to Koofr:

rclone copy /var/moodlebackups/ koofr:Backups/Moodle --progress

I used ‘rclone copy’ instead of ‘sync’, because I want copies: if something happens to backups on Moodle server (e. g. get corrupted, compromised or deleted), I don’t wont this to propagate to backup on Koofr.

3. Lastly, I created a cron job that runs rclone every morning at 6AM6 and writes to a log about it:

crontab -e 

0 6 * * * /usr/bin/rclone copy /var/moodlebackups koofr:/Backups/Moodle --log-file=/var/log/rclone_backup.log --verbose

In the morning I checked the Koofr’s Backup folder and … voila, backups are there.

Now I have another piece of mind in case anything goes wrong.

v4.5 ↩︎

For example https://moodle.org/plugins/local_backupftp ↩︎

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=453937 ↩︎

finding this setting gave me a lot of headache. As a last resort, I asked LLM, but it couldn’t help me. Of course it didn’t, what did I expect. It persistently tried to convince me that the right setting is $CFG->autobackuplocation = ‘/var/moodlebackups’, which is wrong. Another proof of LLM’s incapability and my naïveté. But then, I dug in Moodle’s forums (above) and found the right config keyword. Thank you, PEOPLE, especially Susana L.! ↩︎

Cloud storage from EU, https://koofr.eu/ ↩︎

Why at 6AM? Because Moodle automated backups run at 4AM and they are finished in a few minutes. ↩︎

https://blog.rozman.info/moodle-backups-to-external-location/ #backup #koofr #moodle #rclone