Dealing with Deletions: When (and How) You Can Recover Lost Content
Is there anything worse than working incredibly hard to build a perfect course or Canvas artifact and then realizing that you accidentally deleted it? OK, there are worse things—but this, nonetheless, can be very annoying!! EdTech is occasionally contacted by faculty members who have done some well-intentioned Marie Kondo-ing of their Canvas courses, only to discover that this search for peace and joy in their online life has led to disaster. To allay that feeling of panic when you discover that you have lost important stuff, we would like to take a moment to share with you what artifacts can be recovered from Canvas and how you can do this. Most Canvas users will be happy to know that you CAN recover many objects on your own, without having to fill out a help ticket or send an email.
Canvas Content Items
Canvas content items (quizzes, discussion posts, assignments, etc.) are among the easiest things to recover in Canvas—generally because they are the most often revised and inadvertently lost. Below are three solutions for recovering lost work that may just change your CanvasLife.
Using “Undelete” to Recover Whole Content Items
This Canvas feature makes me wonder how we ever lived without this Canvas feature—and not too many people seem to know about it! If you have deleted a whole content item and wish to recover it, simply navigate to the home page of the course where the deletion occurred, and type “/undelete” at the end of the URL in your browser’s address bar, as shown in the image below. After hitting enter (or GO), you will be directed to a list of deleted content items in your course, with a “restore” button to the right of their name and description. Just click the button to restore the item, noting that it will be returned to the content type’s index page, not to any module to which it was attached (you can re-include it in a module once it is restored).
I have to let you know that this is not entirely foolproof and you should thoroughly check your newly-restored item before publishing it for students, but this has worked VERY well for me in the past—it even restores student assignment submissions that were done before the deletion occurred!
Autosave in the New Rich Content Editor
A wonderful tool that can stave off the loss of content before it happens is built into the new Rich Content Editor that was just released to Canvas in January. Now, when you are editing a Canvas content item and navigate away from the page prior to saving, the next time that you attempt to edit that page, you will be asked if you would like to re-load the unsaved content, as shown in the image below.
Reverting Back to Previous Versions of Canvas Pages
Canvas pages will allow you to revert to previous versions, so that you can save yourself if you happen to make (and save) unwanted edits! This amazing feature only exists within Canvas pages, and I’m thinking that this is because rolling back any assignment with a grade attached to it would only cause confusion and chaos. However, it is amazingly helpful where it is, and quite easy to use, once you know where to look. When looking at a Canvas page, the three dots in the upper right-hand corner provide you with access to the “view page history” button, as shown below.
This button will allow you to see all of the save points for the current page on the right side of your screen, and view the content of all past points by clicking on their name. This facilitates the process of finding your best version of the content. Once you have identified your desired rollback point, just click “Restore this Revision”, as shown in the screenshot to the left.
Whole Canvas Courses
Generally speaking, your Canvas courses should not be deleted unless they are cancelled for the term, but WHEN they are cancelled, their removal is swift and alarming—usually happening within eight hours!
If you were unprepared for the cancellation and wanted to save an archive of the content, all is not lost! You can either put in a ticket to help.fscj.edu or email edtech@fscj.edu to ask us to restore the content for you. Please be sure to include the course ID from Canvas, if possible, or at the least the catalog information (for example, ENC1101) and course number (#8927).
Student Work Submissions
We actually make it pretty hard for you to delete student work submissions, so this section of the blog post is less about how to get them back and more about how to find them, or delete them if the student has posted something really offensive. At this time, Canvas administrators are the only users in the system who can delete student work submissions, but in general it is not really necessary to do so, since by default students can re-submit work an unlimited number of times as long as it is available, unless you provide a restriction (more information about how to set restrictions and what some possible issues are can be found here).
When attempting to access a current student’s prior submissions in a course, you can use a menu at the top of the right of the SpeedGrader to toggle through all submissions, marked by their date and time, as shown in the image to the left.
If a student has been dropped from the class for any reason, they should be marked as “Inactive” in the people panel, and this is by design, not to cause annoyance! If a student is inactive in your course, their work and grades are still stored in the background, making it easy to restore all if they are re-added to the class.
You can also view the grades and work of inactive students from the gradebook, which can be helpful if you are attempting to resolve a student grade appeal or answer questions about participation. To do this, just use the three dots at the top of the name column in the gradebook and make sure that “show inactive enrollments” is checked, as shown in the image to the right.
Canvas Conferences Recordings
So, this is the part of this blog post where I have to deliver some bad news—it is virtually impossible to recover Canvas Conferences recordings unless you are REALLY quick to delete them and VERY punctual in notifying us of the issue. Blindside Networks, our Conferences partner, wipes their servers of deleted recordings every two hours, so we strongly suggest that you are extremely careful with your Conferences recordings and avoid deleting them unless you are absolutely sure that they will never be needed.
WebEx Meetings Recordings
WebEx is a bit more forgiving than Canvas Conferences when it comes to recovering deleted meetings. If you delete a meeting recording from the WebEx portal in Canvas, just visit fscj.webex.com and log in using your FSCJ username and password. From the WebEx homepage, click on “recordings’ in the left corner [1], then use the dropdown that appears in the recordings panel to view your deleted meetings [2]. Once you have located the correct meeting, use the circle icon [3] to restore it.
Note that this will NOT restore the meeting to the recording area of the WebEx portal in Canvas. But, you can place a link to your meeting recording in your course or download it and upload it into Studio for student viewing once it has been restored.
