Undeleting things in Canvas

hollands
Community Contributor
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I'm sure over 90% of people know some of these tricks but I always like to share stuff just in case someone doesn't know some ways to get things back in Canvas.

Recovering things in a course

As a former Blackabord admin I always got that cold feeling in my stomach when someone would call me to tell me they deleted a bunch of things out of their course by accident. Unless it was backed up I knew it would be an uphill battle to get it back. In Canvas however that is not as big of a deal.

Before these steps are laid out, please keep in mind that every Account Rep and tech support person I spoke to about this specifically told me that this is NOT 100%. So you may still be out of luck. Please keep that in mind if you try this and it doesn't work. If that happens a call to Canvas Support might be your best bet.

Step 1 -  Go the course in question.

Step 2 - Check the URL you should see something like this (your institution's name should be there)

Step 2.png

Step 3 - At the end of the URL, type /undelete

Step 3.png

Step 4 - Once you hit enter, you'll see a list of restorable stuff.

What to do if we're a Banner School and we have a course in our feed but it doesn't show up in Canvas

I'm currently working at a Banner School. Our integration has a combo of manual and automatic exports. We also currently cross list outside of Canvas so the cross listed courses with enrollments feed into Canvas rather than using Canvas to cross list (this is likely going to change). At any rate on occasion we run into this problem where we have an uncrosslisted section become cross listed. The uncrosslisted course was already deleted in Canvas but the new course will not show up. For a while this was quite puzzling but we have found a pretty easy solution. I believe this is because when the old course is deleted it marks anything with that information as deleted making the cross listed course automatically become deleted.

SO to fix.

Step 1 - Go in to the Admin Section/Reports

Step 2 - Run a Provisioning report for Courses within the given term.

You'll end up with a huge CSV, but the first column will contain the Canvas course ID which is a specific number for each course (You can find this ID in the URL, yourinstitution.instructure.com/courses/CANVASID.

Step 3 - In our case we can find both the uncrosslisted and the crosslisted course. In this case we need the crosslisted ID.

Step 4 - Canvas was awesome enough to add a course restore in the Admin Tools section. Just click there and paste that ID in there. Now you can pull the course back and you're all set.

This is also applicable to people if they have duplicate SIS id's or were disabled for some reason in the Banner feed. The only difference is it can take some editing of IDs and a SIS import to fix.

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