Backups of our Canvas data

mgudites
Community Novice

I had to put in a support ticket with Instructure the other day because we had an instructor who blew away some content in a course, and we needed to get it back. The /undelete/ option did not cover what she needed in this case. Support's suggestion to me was to restore the content from the Beta environment, which I'm told gets cloned from Production every week. This brought up another larger conversation, which is, what happens if restoring the course from Beta to Prod isn't a viable solution (like, too much time has gone by) -- how do we initiate a restore from backup?

Their response was, and this is a direct quote from an email: Canvas doesn't backup your data. We provide Beta, the beta environment is overwritten with data from the production environment every Saturday. Any work or content you add to your beta environment will be overwritten every week.

Our data isn't being backed up? So if an instructor messes up their production course beyond repair on a Friday, then Beta gets overwritten on Saturday, then the instructor contacts us about it on Monday, we're just SOL? The easy answer is just "don't mess up the course" obviously, but let's face reality which is that faculty are going to be faculty and it's going to happen.

Does anyone else have experience with this? Is our data really not being backed up in a way where if we needed a course brought back from the dead, it could be done?

It feels ludicrous asking this question for what is a cloud-based solution, but if Canvas isn't going to do it, is there a way for us to take backups into our own hands and backup the data to our servers on-prem, or maybe to a Dropbox or something?