I need to recover 60 item banks totaling 600+ items

[whitman_11]

I spent the last 2 weeks in a sprint to finish up 60 item banks, each consisting of about 10 multiple choice questions, complete with 3 distractors and feedback on each item, with linked audio for each question. I have just discovered that I deleted every single one of them, and I cannot find them using the "undelete" procedure. There is a lot of stuff to recover in there, but none of the New Quiz items banks that I just deleted. Where could they be hiding?

Some possibly useful details:

• I was trying to import the quizzes and banks from the master course where I'd created them into one of my current courses, and discovered the much-discussed difficulties in importing New Quizzes and item banks into Carmen courses. Specifically, neither the New Quizzes nor the item banks appeared in the list of importable items.
• By accident, I found that if I imported the entire course, the New Quizzes and banks made the jump just fine.
• I then spent half an hour deleting all the duplicated and unwanted items from the course.
• I then decided to delete the New Quizzes and item banks to try a fresh import (not yet realizing that there were well-recognized difficulties in doing so).
• Upon returning to the master course, I discovered that the item banks were gone!
• Surprisingly, the New Quizzes themselves survived; they just no longer have any item banks associated with them. 

Slightly off-topic: The creation of those 60 item banks several times longer than it should have, because: 

• In a given item bank, you can only edit one question at a time. You can't open it in a new tab; you have to edit it in the same tab where you have the item bank open.
• In a given Carmen shell, you can only select one item bank at a time. You can't open it in a new tab; you have to open it in the tab where all your item banks are listed. 
• So if you want to edit multiple questions at a time for consistency and efficiency, you have to open the same Carmen shell multiple times. If a bank has 10 questions, you need to open that shell in 10 tabs; select the same item bank in each tab; and select a different question in each tab. (You can save a little time by numbering the questions, but because they're listed strictly in the order of their last edit, the numbers are bound to get mixed up. But at least you can know which question you're opening in each tab.)
• A few of the banks had 20+ items. Trying to open 20 tabs for the same Carmen shell led to a lot of lag, so I ended up doing those banks in two passes each. 

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello @whitman_11 ...

I'm not sure if you've tried this option ... but are you aware of the Canvas "test" and "beta" environments?  Normally, when you log in to your school's Canvas environment, you are logging in to a "production" environment.  But, you should also have a "test" and "beta" environment as well.

• What is the Canvas test environment?
• What is the Canvas beta environment?

These two environments are separate from the normal "production" environment, and you may be able to access your item banks in either of these environments...depending on the timing.  The "test" and "beta" environments are refreshed on a regular schedule...which you can find more details on here:

• What are the release schedules for beta, production, and test environments?

If you've never accessed the "test" or "beta" environments before, here are a couple Guides that will help you:

• How do I access the Canvas test environment as an instructor?
• How do I access the Canvas beta environment as an instructor?

Anything you do in either of these environments does not affect things in the "production" environment.

And finally, I always suggest to people that they make sure to log out of "test" or "beta" before returning to "production"...just so that they don't get confused about which environment they are in.

• How do I log out of Canvas?

Hopefully you'll be able to find some or all of the item banks you are looking for in either of those environments.  Please keep us posted here in the Community.  Good luck!

[leward]

@whitman_11 ,

I agree with @Chris_Hofer .  Canvas Beta may be your best hope.  All the banks and questions created before this past Saturday should be there.

Based on the information you provided, I don't think there's a way to recover the banks unless the Instructure folks have the ability to restore from backup or something similar.  Item banks are not copied when you import a bank.  When you create a bank, it is available to use in all your courses.  Thus, when you deleted the banks from the imported course, you actually deleted the original banks, not copies of the original.  Aside from trying to recover the banks and questions from Canvas beta, I would suggest opening a ticker with Canvas support.  You may need to work through your campus support team.

[kroeninm]

I'd love to hear if you have a solution, this is one of my biggest concerns with New Quizzes, faculty are used to the banks being within a course, when they are actually stored globally which is a huge mind shift, it will take training, faculty are often sharing content back and forth between colleagues and different courses so they'll need to rethink a bit on how they do this.

As mentioned above, if you delete a bank, it deletes it from every course it's attached to and I don't think I found them in the undelete area as well when I've tested before. 

When importing selective content however, the New Quizzes I think usually appear under Assignments when you selectively import since they are an LTI tool.  They don't appear under the Quizzes category.  Item banks are not something you can copy when you do a course import.  

Here's a bit more information if you get the banks restored on the different ways to how you could potentially duplicate a course "with" it's item banks which may be needed in some cases.  I found in testing that right now, exporting and importing is the primary way to duplicate a set of banks with course instead of needing to duplicate each bank individually and then relink.  But I would always retest and check as there's not clear documented information about this in the guides that I've seen. https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/New-Quizzes-Discussion/Copy-Share-Export-Import-Expected-behavior... 

Melanie