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Storage Drivers

Storage drivers are responsible for safely transferring a finished archive to a specific storage location. When creating archives for legal reasons, storing the archives in an external WORM1 storage is strongly advised.

Once all data for a single archive job is collected, the archiving manager will call the storage driver that is responsible for the respective task. The storage driver will then write all data to the associated storage and create \local_archiving\file_handle objects for each file that has been stored. File handles keep track of stored files and contain various metadata that allows to retrieve the referenced files from the external storage system at a later point in time.

Storage Driver API

Tasks and Responsibilities

Writing Data to Storage

Provides an interface to write archives to storage

  • Data must be stored in a way that overriding existing data is not possible, even if archive file names are identical

Reading Data from Storage

Provides an interface to read archives from storage

  • If data retrieval is not possible, the data can not be retrieved via Moodle
  • If data retrieval is not possible, GDPR compliance (automatic deletion, personal data retrieval) is not possible

Authentication

Store credentials for authentication against the storage system, if applicable

  • Credentials must only be visible to the system administrators

Connection Check

Provides a way to check the status of the storage system connection (e.g., connection test, test write, test read)

Storage Space Monitoring

Provides a way to monitor the available storage space, if reported by the respective storage system / interface

Configurability

Allowing independent configuration of the different available storage drivers (e.g., storage path, storage system credentials, ...)

Interfaced Components

Examples

Moodledata Storage

TODO

This section is still work in progress (WIP) and might contain incomplete, incorrect, or outdated information.

  • Stores archived data in the Moodle storage system
  • Archived data is stored in the file area of a specific course

File System Storage

TODO

This section is still work in progress (WIP) and might contain incomplete, incorrect, or outdated information.

  • Copies archived data to a given filesystem path
  • Filepath can be configured in the driver settings

S3 Object Storage

TODO

This section is still work in progress (WIP) and might contain incomplete, incorrect, or outdated information.

  • Sends archived data to a S3 compatible object storage system (e.g., WORM storage)

FTP

TODO

This section is still work in progress (WIP) and might contain incomplete, incorrect, or outdated information.

  • Uploads archived data to a FTP server

  1. WORM: "write once, read many" - A storage solution that allows to write data only once and only allow subsequent reads. Changes of data that was once written is prohibited. ↩