I had been using MOODLE 2.4 for 5 months when I noticed that I had lost the ability to perform my weekly course backup for one of my courses inside of MOODLE. At the time, I was not sure what had triggered the inactivation of this function so I foraged the MOODLE forums to seek out solution. After extensive research, a few users recommended increasing the memory and execution time in the php.ini file. I was not able to change the parameters established my host company because my contract was for shared hosting, which denied access to changing these features. However, through research and trial and error, I came up with 2 successful solutions.
Through research, I learned that I could back up the entire website from the control panel, thus saving my course. While this approach preserved the entire website including the courses and their corresponding data, I lost the ability to restore or share only the course because their file extensions differed. While this was not my ideal approach, I continued to utilize this method until the end of the course when students were no longer accessing and updating course work in MOODLE.
During the summer, from trial and error, I recognized that I could import activities, blocks and filters from previously generated courses into a shell course. Consequently, I created 4 shell courses with the exact parameters as the problematic courses. Then, I migrated only 9 weeks of activities to each new shell course from the problematic course. Then, I was able to successfully backup within MOODLE again. Honestly, it was painstakingly long, however I had regained the ability to complete a course back so I was happy.
Since I had collected a lot of useful testing data and exemplars of student work in the original course, I later decided to keep this course as template for data analysis.