Archiving your course

Archive your course

Outcome You set a date after which the course is archived, freeing up storage while preserving student work for download or distribution.

Before you start

• You are a Space Administrator of the course.

• The course is winding down or the term has ended.

Course spaces have a defined lifecycle. After a configured date, the space is archived automatically - its data moves to cold storage, freeing space for active courses. This is conceptually similar to resting spaces in research projects, but archival is specific to course spaces and managed automatically. See Concepts › The hierarchy and resource model for the conceptual model.

Set or change the archival date

1

Open the course space.

2

Navigate to the space overview.

3

Click the info button next to the space's name.

4

In the side panel that opens, edit Archive by date.

The space is archived automatically overnight on the configured date. You can change the archival date at any time before archival happens.

What archival means for you and students

• Application and personal data in student instances are backed up to cold storage.

• Applications can't be launched in an archived course directly.

• Data can be restored from snapshots, after which files can be downloaded and applications started again.

• After a few days' grace period, restored instances are re-archived automatically. Snapshots can be restored as many times as needed.

Archived courses are not for everyday use. Restored snapshots are periodically re-archived without taking new safety backups. Restore a snapshot in an archived course only when you need to either download specific data or distribute files, tables, or applications to another active space.

Assignments in archived courses

When a course is archived, the Assignments view remains accessible (moved to the bottom of the sidebar) but is shown in a read-only, dimmed state:

• Assignment rows are greyed out to indicate the archived state.

• Action buttons (submit hand-in, edit assignment, delete) are hidden.

• Clicking an assignment name does not navigate to its detail page.

Assignment history remains visible for reference, but no modifications are possible.

Find archived courses

1

Open the space dropdown in the breadcrumbs.

2

Toggle on Archived.

3

Only your three most recent archived spaces appear; click List all archived courses for the full list.

Resume work in an archived course

To resume work, restore a past snapshot to the Current state. After restoration you have a three-day grace period to work with the data or download what you need. After the grace period, the Current state is deleted again. If you need more time, restore the snapshot again - there is no limit on repeats.

Reuse a course for the next term

Outcome You bring your teaching material into a new course space for the next term without manually re-uploading everything.

Before you start

• The previous course space still exists (active or archived).

• You have decided what to carry forward - typically the polished material from the Master Instance, not student work.

• You hold Faculty or Manager role so you can create a new course space.

The full cross-term workflow is covered as a tutorial - see Tutorials › Reusing a course for the next term in the Instructor tutorials. The tutorial walks through capturing the previous Master Instance as a snapshot, creating the new course, and cross-distributing materials.