Backing up Exercises in OWLS

The OWLS software allows you to easily create exercises. Eventually, however, instructors will want to save their files, or delete, rename, and temporarily remove exercises they have created. Also, to protect against accidental deletion or modification of files, it is recommended that exercises are backed up occasionally.

There is no built-in feature to allow this, so the only current way of backing files up is by connecting to the OWLS-powered site by FTP. When you have connected, download the individual exercises from each folder (or simply the folders with the names of the exercises such as reading, media, glossaries, etc.) to your own computer.

The only complication is that files which have been downloaded that are later uploaded to the site must take care to assign the correct permissions to those files. The OWLS software has only the power to delete and modify files which are "world-writable" by the web server, as such, use your FTP software to modify the permissions of the files you upload to the server again so that the files are world readable and world writable.

Finally, to backup the links and preferences created by OWLS, download and keep a copy of the includes folder.

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OWLS is a free open-source project created by Konrad Mitchell Lawson
Visit the OWLS homepage for more information.
owls@foolsworkshop.com

Last Updated: November 2, 2002