Why does the plugin not allow backup and restore? Is there a way to do it?

[cobiam]

Kind regards, I want to congratulate you in advance for your great work and willingness to help the Moodle educational community with your work and intelligence. We are currently working on a Moodle 3.1 instance with 20k active users at my university and each semester we must load around 3,500 courses for students and all teachers are using webex meeting, therefore we want them to continue using it, but from their groups and thus be able to carry reports on the use of the plugin by students and teachers. Our university has 1500 paid webex licenses, that is why it is so important for us that your plugin could have the possibility to allow backups and restorations, otherwise we are currently doing the restorations of the webex meeting type activities manually (3500). It is crazy. Again I respectfully ask you, is there any technical reason why you cannot restore and backup your plugin in Moodle? or is it simply necessary to implement it? Thank you very much for your time and collaboration. Saludos desde Colombia.

[ericmerrill]

It's a couple of reasons.

First, it hasn't been a big priority for our institution, and in fact, we are moving away from Webex entirely.

Second, it's a bit complicated. What does backup and restore mean? When we restore, do we just create new meetings with the same name and description? Do we link to the recordings from the original? What happens when the recordings from the original get deleted? The recordings are stored on the Webex server, not in Moodle, making that complicated to answer, and could mean a restore might no contain recordings that are expected to be there.

There are some ways around this, including there is a way to have plugin specific restore settings, but I'm not sure if those are official, or just hacked in by some plugin authors. But again, the main reason is a lack of priority here.