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Backing up a Section in Blackboard

Why you should backup

Information Technology Services Division (ITS) has full disaster recovery systems in place to ensure that in the unlikely event of a catastrophic failure, any data loss will be minimal. These systems are not designed to restore an individual teaching section, rather to restore the entire service. Equally, Blackboard is not an archiving service. Each staff member is responsible for keeping backups of the materials uploaded to Blackboard. The section backups that you perform are to protect you from disasters like the accidental deletion of all of the student submissions for an assignment (i.e. a user error).

When you should backup

You should perform a backup of your section before making any major changes or after the completion of marking for a major piece of assessment. Make sure that you download your backup file prior to making any major changes or deleting of materials.

Types of Backups

Section Backups

It is important that you do a section backup before making major changes or after completion of major student assignments or assessments have been submitted and/or marked.

To backup a section, first open the Blackboard Manager (opens in a new window) and navigate to the section you wish to back up. In our example we will use the section titled “Using coloured chalk effectively S1 2008”. Click on the [Backup] link under the “Section utilities” heading.

You will then see a confirmation screen. If you are ready to perform a backup, click the [Submit request] button.

Once you have submitted your request, you will see a “Backup request received” screen which indicates your place in the backup queue. You will also be sent an email confirming that your backup request is in the queue. Click the [Return to …] button to return to managing the section.

When the backup has been successfully processed, you will receive a second email indicating that it has been completed. This email will also contain a link to the backup file for you to download. Please note that these backup files are not stored indefinitely for you, you must download them from the server in order to be able to use them later (if needed). You cannot open these backup files to extract anything from them, they must be restored into Blackboard to access any material in them. As it is possible to overwrite existing sections (which may be in use for teaching), the ability to restore sections has been restricted to the Faculty Administrators only.

Grade Book Backups

It is recommended that you download your Grade Book regularly:

Weekly
When new assessment results have been added

How to backup the Grade Book by downloading a csv file (L)

Recover your Grade Book by editing it manually (L, T)

Recover your Grade Book by importing a download .csv file (L, T)