It’s that time of the year again where we all clear out our closets of old clothes, wipe down every surface, clean out our dryer ducts (Yes, really! This should be done annually to prevent fires) and in general try to declutter our lives. The same principles should be applied to your digital life and data. Consider this a gentle nudge to review your old data in Sakai and see if you already have copies of it in other locations or if that old data can be tossed in the digital recycling bin to clear up space for new things. A couple of the places we’d recommend reviewing are:
Schedule sites for deletion
If you’ve been teaching at Duke for a while, you likely copy most of your core content over semester to semester into your new sites and make small tweaks when needed. As such, you likely don’t need that site from 6 years ago that contains outdated content that you’ve updated and used in newer courses. If you find a couple of your old sites you don’t need anymore, you can schedule them for deletion. See here for instructions on how to do so. We’ll keep the sites for a minimum of one year after you schedule them for deletion in case you change your mind and want to recover the data.
Note: Only instructors (course sites) and Owners (project sites) can schedule a site for deletion. A site scheduled for deletion will remove the site and its data from all enrolled users’ view.
Organize Site Favorites Tray
For many, a new semester brings about new educational opportunities. This also means a new set of Sakai sites to be added to the Site Favorites Tray that appears at the top of Sakai after logging in. Did you know that you can customize the order of sites that appear there? See this guide for how to reorder sites, favorite and unfavorite sites to best suit your tastes and needs.
Backup important content to an external platform
We strive to keep Sakai up and running when you need it. However, Sakai shouldn’t be the sole source of your most important educational documents. We recommend keeping at least one backup of items you can’t do without, stored on a platform or system outside of Sakai. For example, users could backup data to a cloud storage provider like Box or Dropbox or save to their local hard drive.
If you aren’t sure what data you still need, feel free to reach out to the Learning Innovation team or visit our virtual Office Hours to speak to a consultant who can review the data with you. At the end of the day, we want to help make sure your data is where you need it and avoid old data cluttering your Sakai experience.
