This feature performs daily incremental backups of all courses in the system that have been modified since the last backup was made.

This means that we can always revert to the "yesterday" version of the course if necessary elements are accidentally deleted. Blackboard keeps incremental versions for the last 30 days.

It is important to understand that if we download one of these backups, we are not downloading the incremental backup but a full archive that can be restored on any other Learn instance.

On the other hand, note that when a course is deleted from the system, its last backup will be kept for only 30 days, so do not rely on them being available as long as needed and download them to a local disk or an S3 bucket.

Existing courses in the system only keep backups for 30 days, as mentioned above.

Adjusting the automatic backup settings

Blackboard allows us to configure automatic backups from Admin Panel > Courses > Course Settings > Auto Archive Settings.

We can choose how to manage files linked in the course that reside outside the course directory: we can choose to copy them or just copy a link. If we choose the latter and restore in another environment, these links will not work.

Downloading and restoring automatic backups

We can download the backup directly from Admin Panel > Courses > Courses, searching for the specific course and clicking Export / Archive in the contextual menu.

To restore, from Admin Panel > Courses > Courses > Create Course > Restore we search for the backup in the content collection and restore it.

Additionally, we also have the option to download these automatic backups in batches, using a script developed for this purpose.

Where are the automatic backups located?

You can access the automatic backups from Admin Panel > Content Management > Manage Content and following the path /internal/autoArchive. You will find a list of folders, one per course, whose identifier is the course ID plus the creation date (COURSEID_YYYYMMDD).

Entering the folder, we will see all existing backups for that course, along with their respective logs.