Backing up a WebCT Course

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Backing up a WebCT Course

The Backup Course function allows you to make a backup of everything in your course.

Ideally, you will never have to use your backup to restore a course, but you should get in the habit of making backups regularly. You should always make a backup when you are about to make a major change to a course, such as removing 50 students, or when you are about to reset a course.

NOTE: In addition to using WebCT's backup capability, you should also download WebCT student grades into an Excel spreadsheet. Store these files as records even after the course is over, in the event of student grade disputes or errors.

There are three simple steps to back up a WebCT course at UCSF:

Navigate to WebCT's Backup Course link

Log into WebCT and enter the course that you want to reset. In the Control Panel click on the Manage Course button.
On the right hand side of the Manage Course page, click on the Backup Course link.

Select Create backup as your action

You will see a list of any existing backups of your course. From the Actions on the right hand side, click on Create backup.

Describe your backup

Enter a short description of your backup into the text box. This description will be listed along with the filename in a list of backups of the course. The filename will be created by WebCT and includes the course name, the month and day of the month, but not the year. When entering your description, be sure to include the current year, and any other descriptors you wish. Then click the Create button.

Reset Course

The following confirmation appears, showing you the filename that has been created which stores all the current data from the course. Click the Continue button.

Reset Course

You are now done creating the backup file, which we hope you will never have to use. The backup file that you just created will be stored on the WebCT server and can be used to restore the course to the exact state it was in at the time the backup file was created.

Although it is not necessary, you may want to download the backup file to your own computer for safekeeping. If you do download the backup file to your computer, you will not be able to unzip it or access your course files from it, because it is in a proprietary zip format that is only understandable to the WebCT server.

Note: Course designers can currently save up to three (3) backups on each of their WebCT courses. If you need to maintain more than three backups per course, you can download them to your local computer.