Delete RAW data from recordings after deleting recordings in Moodle

[Anton]

Cear Community,

if I delete a BBB-recording in Moodle, the published files on the server will also be deleted. But the RAW files still exists.
Is there any possibility to delete also RAW files automatically after deleting it in Moodle?
If not, this could be a feature request, eg: the recordings could be marked as "<ID>.norecord", so RAW files could be deleted after N-Days via a CRON Job.

thanks, best regards
Anton

[Chad Pilkey]

There's already a cron job included with BigBlueButton installs that can delete the raw files after a certain number of days. http://docs.bigbluebutton.org/2.2/customize.html#delete-raw-data-from-published-recordings

The reason that the raw and published deletions aren't tied together is that sometimes a user will mistakenly delete a recording or they will forget to start a recording. In either of these scenarios having the raw files is helpful because the recording can then be regenerated.

[Anton]

Dear Chad,

Yes, now we are using the CRON Job, but we only use the function to delete unpublished files/RAWs after a certain number of days. We are thinking about that we want to delete also all RAW-files after certain number of month/years.

We are using BBB only together with moodle. The problem is that there is only a limited connection between the moodle-plugin and the bbb-server:

If someone will not publish a recording, the moodle plugin allows to unpublish the files and vice versa. That works fine. In our university the person who wants to delete the recording wants also delete the whole files and also the RAW-recordings. Actually only the published files will be deleted. A great problem is if someone uses bbb-activity in moodle and delete the bbb-activity. As far as I know the published and RAW files will remain on the bbb-server.

I think a possibility could be that after deleting it in Moodle a file named as <meeting ID>.deleted will be stored in the folder ../recording/status/archived and after a certain number of days the published and RAWs will also be deleted via CRON.

I unterstand that someone could make a mistake and delete a recording or forget to press the start-recording-button. But for this scenario the cron job will delete recordings after N-days (we changed it to 40 days - so it will be much time to republish the recordings).

Anyway, regarding to different scenarios in each organisation/university it seems to be difficult to find a good solution.

best regards, Anton

[Chad Pilkey]

The fact that the recordings stay even after an activity is deleted is a common quirk between all of the front-ends. The BigBlueButton server can't actually do anything about it on its own because it has no visibility into the LMS. Ideally the LMS would send a request to delete the recording when the activity is deleted, but I'm not even sure if that's possible because there's likely restrictions on what the LMS plugins can do.