With the sheer volume of Moodle content formats available, controlling your site data usage can be challenging. And that’s before you take into account the growth effect of adding new users and courses… To make things slightly easier, we’ve identified three key factors that will help you streamline your site.

Video content, while a popular and accessible e-learning delivery format, tends to be the usual culprit when it comes to course bloat. To get around this, consider hosting your video content elsewhere, as Moodle’s built-in filters allow videos to be embedded neatly within your courses from links, so you don’t need the video file itself to be uploaded to the site.

Platforms like Vimeo offer a range of tailored solutions for different levels of upload volume, including a basic free tier available to get you started. Moodle is also compatible with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) repository, giving you another fuss-free, externally hosted option for video streaming that won’t impact your Moodle disk usage.

Best of all? This type of third-party hosting will be significantly cheaper than the memory/disk space on specialist software (i.e. Moodle/IOMAD) configured servers.

Configuring automated course backups is generally considered good practice, as they effectively offer a “save point” for you to restore from should something go horribly wrong. But there is a downside: the impact on your disk usage.

While backup files are compressed as much as possible, the more courses you’re backing up, the more of your storage space gets eaten up by backup files. To balance this out, you can customise the automated schedule to delete the backups after a certain number of days.

If you’re on a very strict disk allowance, however, consider turning off automated backups and only back up your courses when you really need to. It’s also worth checking in with your hosting provider for an idea of their server backup policy, as this alone may be more than sufficient in case of emergency and could eliminate the need for automated course backups altogether.

Even with server access, it can be tricky to get a full picture of exactly where your site data usage is coming from. Plugins to the rescue! In particular, the course size report is a quick, easy way of staying on top of your usage.

The report offers an overview of your data usage per course, categorised by course content and backups. For even more detail, you can also view a breakdown of exactly where your disk space is going per course, whether that’s user data or specific activity types.

At any stage of your Moodle journey, installing this plugin will give you a better idea of which courses will require the most maintenance to keep your usage under control and what specific areas you’ll need to clear down to achieve this.