It is highly recommended that you perform a few backup tasks at the end of each semester and/or before requesting a course deletion from Blackboard. These are only guidelines for elements that you may want to backup; there may be other areas of your course you wish to backup in addition to our recommendations.

We recommend that all Blackboard instructors perform the following tasks at the end of each semester and/or before requesting a course deletion:

1. Export the Gradebook for your Blackboard course(s).

2. Backup your Discussion Board postings.

3. Create an archive or export of your courses.

4. Export Course Statistics.

Export your Gradebook:

Instructors using the Gradebook can export and save a copy of it for use in Excel or in another spreadsheet program. Keeping a copy of your Gradebook is a good idea for backup and archival purposes.

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Backup your Discussion Board Postings:

Discussion Board threads and messages often cannot always be retrieved from a course archive. Any important threads should be downloaded for future reference.

The Collect option, in the Discussion Board toolbar, allows you to use the checkboxes to select a number of messages to be viewed on one screen. If you use this function to display a whole thread worth of messages, you can copy and paste the data into a word processor.

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Archives and Exports

Your course content (i.e. materials that you have made available in a Content Area) will be included in a course archive and a course export; however, you will not be able to access the materials from Blackboard once the course is removed. However, a nice feature of course archives and exports is the ability to retrieve course documents from the zip folder created by Blackboard without the need to restore the file on Blackboard.

These methods allow you to save large portions of your course outside of the Blackboard environment:

Archive Course

The archive creates a record of a course including all content and user information. Course Archives can be restored in their entirety (by a Blackboard Administrator) in order to retrieve important data, or imported into another course in order to copy the course contents. (Please note that future upgrades of Blackboard may not support older course archives and that you should save your course information including your content and gradebook according to the other suggested methods.)

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Export Course

This method creates a package of the course contents that can later be imported into another course. It is important to note that, unlike the Archive Course feature, Export Course does not include any user information with the course—it only includes the content of the Course.

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Export Course Statistics

In order to maintain good performance of the Blackboard system, course statistics that are older than 180 days are automatically deleted. This means that you will only see up to 180 days worth of course statistics in your course at any given time. Therefore, it is highly recommended that you download your course statistics at the end of each term. We cannot retrieve this information for you - it is your responsibility to save it and store it for each term.

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