Data Retention and Optimize Searching

[krgiffith]

The past couple of weeks I have experienced a lag when searching for courses. It has been worse the past two days and I saw on the Canvas Status page others may have been experiencing the same. 

Even though this is a known issue, I'm taking this opportunity to clean up our data in hopes to speed things up.  We have had Canvas since 2015 and never had policies on what would be retained. (aka everything was kept) We also imported many things from 2013-14 from our previous LMS. 

So far I have deleted 1000 unused shells.  Any recommendations on retention policies and other ways to optimize searching? 

[jlubkinchavez]

@krgiffith Curious is you (or anyone else!) has come up with some guidelines for retention policies?

[robotcars]

Hi,

The Account Settings has a report for Unused Courses. We do this at the end of each school year, and use the API to delete (deep archive) them.  We call it 'deep archive'.. as deleting a course in Canvas removes you from seeing it within Canvas, but it can still be restored with the API. Canvas Data also keeps deleted course records, which satisfies retention purposes.

[jlubkinchavez]

That's helpful @robotcars Do you know if users are also "deep archived" (restorable)? And do you know if/where this is documented by Instructure? Thanks!

[robotcars]

@jlubkinchavez,

For users, I'm not sure how to delete a user with the API, and I've never tried to delete an SIS user via Import. Canvas Data has 'deleted' workflow_states for many objects in Canvas, including Courses and Users.

https://portal.inshosteddata.com/docs#course_dim

If you download CD, you will be able to see a deleted course, whether it was used or not, and any assignments, submissions, enrollments, users, etc; but not necessarily everything. 

We don't delete users, employees or students, in our K12, we have a lot of transiency, students change schools, leave state, come back, or maybe later through Adult Ed, similar for staff. Our SIS configuration defaults all users to 'active' status, and we never delete users. If a user returns, they retain all their old stuff because we never deleted them. Likewise, courses created from our SIS are always active, any course that is used will never be deleted.... and any Unused Course will be deleted after the school year.

To restore a course use the API

https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/courses.html#method.courses.update

course[event]

'undelete' attempts to recover a course that has been deleted. This action requires account administrative rights. (Recovery is not guaranteed; please conclude rather than delete a course if there is any possibility the course will be used again.) The recovered course will be unpublished. Deleted enrollments will not be recovered.

Recovery is not guaranteed, is why I stay away from doing this on used courses.

The Unused  Courses report has this information

This is a report of all courses that have none of the following items: assignments, announcements, discussions, files, modules, pages, or quizzes