Rsync and Rdiff implementation on Moodle's backup and restore feature for course synchronization over the network

Abstract

E-learning has been widely implemented in educations system. Most higher institutions have applied Learning Management Systems (LMSs) to manage their online courses, with Moodle as one of the most favored LMS. However on the other side creating a well designed and written course remains problematic for teachers. That's why the community encourages them to share their courses for others to reuse. The authors or teachers then will continuously revise their courses, that will make subscribers to re-download the whole course again, which will soon lead to exhaustive network usage. To cope with this issue a synchronization model of course's backup file is proposed, retrieving the differential updates only. This paper proposed the synchronization of the existing backup and restore features. The file synchronization is performed between course's backup files based on rsync algorithm. The experiment was conducted on virtual machine, local network, and public network. The result showed lower network traffic compared to the conventional sharing method just like our previous synchronization method. However unlike the previous one this method had two other additional advantages which are the flexibility to control the synchronization content and compatibility to all versions of Moodle.