Archiving your course

Education spaces typically have a well-defined lifecycle: first the space is prepared for teaching or workshop, then the session(s) take place, finally the space is no longer used actively. To optimise storage usage for our users, education spaces are archived after a previously set date to free up resources that are rarely used anymore.

What space archival means

1. Application and personal data in student instances will be backed up to cold storage to free up storage space for use in other spaces.

2. Application and personal data can be restored easily from snapshots in archived spaces, after which the data can be downloaded or the application(s) can be started again.

3. After a few days grace period, restored instances in archived spaces are re-archived. To access the data or application again, the appropriate snapshot must be restored again. This can be repeated as many times as necessary.

Notes for space archival

1. The master and distributed instances in teaching spaces are never archived. We understand that instructors usually rely on past courses to build current ones - for that reason, data in the Master and Distributed instances is always just a few clicks away.

2. After a space has been archived, students can still access data and run applications in it. However, archived spaces are not meant for everyday use: instances with restored snapshots are periodically re-archived, without taking safety backups. Restoring a snapshot in an archived space should serve 2 purposes: either to download data or to distribute files/tables/applications to another space.

Finding archived spaces

By default, your archived spaces are not shown in the navigation panel. You need to use the toggle to show them:

Archived spaces are not show by default

Configuring space archival

You can set the desired archival date at space creation time. The default value is 5 months after creation.

The space will be archived automatically overnight after the set date.

You can also edit the desired archival date anytime before it has been archived. Navigate to the course overview, and click on the info button next to the space's name. This brings up a side panel where the Archive by date can be edited.

Edit the archive by date on the course overview page

You cannot set the archive by date more than 6 months into the future

Instance re-archival

To access data in student instances of archived spaces, each student can restore past snapshots to the current state. They will be able to work in the instance as before, however after a 3 days grace period, the contents of the current state will be deleted again.

When an instance is re-archived, all files and folders in its current state are deleted permanently. Don't upload new, valuable data to archived instances, as no automatic backup will be taken before re-archival!