OCA Spaces Support & Guidance

Exporting & Importing

This sub-chapter is particularly applicable to students who’ve completed a course unit and/or their degree and are looking to retain their work, or students who’ve used an alternate hosting provider, such as WordPress.com, and are looking to migrate their work to OCA Spaces. The Export process is also applicable to those looking to keep a local (on device) backup of their work, although OCA Spaces is backed up daily and students therefore do not need to manually backup their work.

Additionally and by following this process, you’re essentially creating a copy or duplicate of your existing learning log, and once duplicated the two versions are not connected, and any changes made to one will not be reflected on the other. The original site, whether this be available on OCA Spaces and/or WordPress.com, for instance, will also remain and be unaffected. The TEL Team therefore recommends students migrate their learning log only after completing a unit and/or their degree.

Export

The Export process involves taking a copy of an existing site, available on OCA Spaces for instance, before subsequently importing elsewhere, such as on WordPress.com or vice versa, following the Import process.

To export your site, first access the WordPress Dashboard and select ‘Tools’ - located in the left hand menu - followed by ‘Export’. On the following page and ensuring the ‘All Content’ option is selected, select the blue ‘Download Export File’ option. Selecting this option will prompt you to download either a single .XML file, or a ZIP folder; the latter of which you'll need to unzip, before continuing to follow the Import process, and contains multiple .XML files. The number of ZIP files downloaded will be determined by the amount of content, both blog posts and media, available on your site.

For information on extracting a ZIP folder, please refer to the following appropriate; Unzipping a ZIP folder on Mac or Extracting a ZIP folder on Windows.

Import

The Import process involves takes the .XML file(s), downloaded following the Export process, and importing them onto another site, thus completing the migration.

Having first followed the Export process and with the .XML file(s) downloaded, and if necessary, unzipped, first create a new site, either on OCA Spaces - for those migrating to OCA Spaces - or another hosting provider, such as WordPress.com - for those migrating away from OCA Spaces.

Upon creating a new site, again access the WordPress Dashboard and select ‘Tools’ followed by ‘Import’, where you’ll be prompted to upload the .XML file(s). In the event you’ve several .XML files available, you’ll need to repeat this process - minus creating a new site - for each .XML file available.

Upon uploading a single .XML file, it may take several minutes or hours to complete the migration, and in the event you've a single .XML available, completing the Import process will complete the migration process, while in the event you've multiple .XML files available, completing the migration process for a single .XML file will likely only migrate a portion of your learning log.