[ARCHIVED] Undelete not working

[clovis]

I just accidentally deleted several question banks from one of my courses. Doh!

Doing some quick searching on the Canvas Community it seemed like there was an easy solution: You just add "undelete" to the url of your Canvas course. This is supposed to bring up a Canvas page that has a list of your deleted files. You are supposed to check the ones that you want to restore and Canvas restores them.

But I tried this it didn't work. I did get a page that says Restore Deleted Items but there are no deleted items listed on the page.

Any ideas about how to retrieve the deleted question banks?

Alex

[Stef_retired · Accepted solution]

@clovis  Since you've been researching the Undelete functionality here, you've probably already discovered that it is not a supported solution and doesn't work for every deleted item. Your best course of action would be to contact Canvas Support immediately to see if they can help you restore the missing question banks, perhaps from your beta instance.

[Stef_retired · Accepted solution]

@clovis  Since you've been researching the Undelete functionality here, you've probably already discovered that it is not a supported solution and doesn't work for every deleted item. Your best course of action would be to contact Canvas Support immediately to see if they can help you restore the missing question banks, perhaps from your beta instance.

[clovis]

Hi, Stefanie. Thank you for responding. I will do that ASAP.

Thank you,

Alex

[clovis]

Just a follow up. I did contact support and they said that there was not a way to retrieve those deleted question banks.

Dang.

I politely suggested to the support person that Canvas ought to have a Trash/Recycle Bin (like on a computer desktop) where deleted items are stored until the user can double check that they truly meant to delete the items.

[Stef_retired]

@clovis  That's a bummer, for sure. If it were me I'd still dig around in my beta instance to see what, if anything, I could salvage by exporting my quizzes, or entire courses, from beta (see  How do I access the Canvas beta environment as an ...  and  How do I export quiz content from a course?  ) and then importing them into a sandbox course in my live instance.

[clovis · Accepted solution]

STEFANIE YOU'RE A LIFE SAVER!

After Canvas Support told me that the deleted Qbanks could not be restored I gave up hope. But I tried your suggestion and it worked exactly as you said it would. 

1) I logged into beta Canvas and found the course shell from which I had deleted the Qbanks. Sure enough, all of the "deleted" Qbanks were there. By the way, this particular "course" shell (Bio 1 Sandbox) has no content other than the Qbanks for my actual Bio 1 course shell. I use it simply as site to store the Qbanks.

2) I exported the entire beta Bio 1 Sandbox course as a course export file onto my computer desktop. It took several minutes because there are 70 Qbanks, some with hundreds of questions, and many of those questions have images in them. So the whole file was over 100 MB. 

3) I then logged in non-beta Canvas and found the Bio 1 Sandbox course shell from which I had deleted the 70 Qbanks. In that course shell, I imported the entire exported course file from my desktop. Because I use the Bio 1 Sandbox shell only to hold Qbanks I didn't have to worry about any content being overwritten by the imported course file. The import took several minutes.

4) It worked perfectly. All 70 of the Qbanks were restored.

As soon as I saw that it had worked I immediately exported two other sandbox course shells that I use to hold Qbanks for two other courses. So now I have my own back up course files of all three of my Qbank course shells. If I ever accidentally delete any Qbanks again in Canvas I can restore them easily.

So again, thank you very much Stefanie. You saved me hours of work restoring all of those Qbanks. My email is aedens@hartnell.edu. If you email me an address I would be happy to send you a box of chocolates.