Exporting your work

We would recommend making a backup of your items (and tests) at least once a day before going home.

For Ignite customers, backups to the hard drive are automatically made at regular intervals in TAO, but getting them back into TAO if the need arises is a relatively complex procedure and takes time. Also, you'd need to ask the systems administrator to intervene every time. To make things simpler, it's best to make your own backups in TAO itself. The way to do this is to export your work (in other words, save it externally).

To export your items only (see below for exporting items in tests), select the folder in the library you'd like to make a backup of, then click on Export in the button bank. It’s a good idea to export a relatively small amount of items (10-20 items, for example, not the whole item bank) in each export. Choose QTI package 2.2 as an export format (this is the default). A list of contents for the export QTI 2.2 package will be shown on the screen, and will contain all the items in that folder.

The image shows an export of Ian Archer's folder scratch folder, containing his trigonometry items.

Ian's folder with his trigonometry items

You can export tests in the same way. It is also worth bearing in mind as an item author that if the items you want to export have already been assembled in a test, you can just export the corresponding test, as the export will include the items that are in it.

The export process can take a while, in which case it will be moved to the background (you can see in the green circle next to settings that there is a process going on in the background).

The exported folder will be saved in your downloads folder as a zip file. You'll see that it has a UNIX-type timestamp. If you like, you can change the name to something that is more meaningful for you. It is good practice, though, to use the standard date format used for versions of data - e.g. 2021-04-10 – so that you can see clearly when each of your backups was from.

Re-importing your items and tests

In case you need your backups – for example if the originals were accidently deleted by somebody else (or you) - you'll need to re-import them. You can do this using the Import button in the button bank under the libraries. Choose the zip file from your downloads folder (or wherever you've saved the backup you made the day before). This will be imported and unpacked in the folder you were browsing when you clicked the Import button. 

If you import a test, the individual items in it can be accessed in the Item Bank. The items will be imported into a dedicated folder which bears the name of the test (i.e. its label), and can be found directly under the "root" item folder. It’s important to remember that these imported items and tests are considered by TAO to be new resources (even if they exist already), which bear no reference at all to existing resources. This means that the originals are not replaced by the backups you are importing, so, for example, if Ian Archer made a backup of his folder containing his test items for trigonometry, as in the last lesson, which he then imports into the same folder, each item will appear twice - once is the original and the second is the backup.

More information on exporting items or tests can be found in the chapters Exporting Items and Exporting a test in the User Guide. Information on importing items or tests back into TAO can be found in the chapters Importing Items and Importing a test.