If you are planning to migrate your Moodle site to MoodleCloud, you will need to calculate the size of your site to ensure that you purchase a plan with sufficient storage.


There is no easy way to calculate the size of your existing Moodle site. 

  • If you have technical skills here is the SQL query we use to calculate disk quota:

SELECT SUM(f.filesize) FROM ( SELECT DISTINCT contenthash, filesize FROM mdl_files WHERE filearea <> 'draft' AND referencefileid IS NULL AND component <> 'tool_recyclebin' AND (component <> 'backup' OR mimetype <> 'application/vnd.moodle.backup') AND component <> 'assignfeedback_editpdf' AND component <> 'core_h5p' AND component <> 'contentbank' UNION SELECT contenthash, filesize from mdl_files WHERE (component = 'core_h5p' AND filearea = 'content'> GROUP BY filesize, contenthash ) AS f");

This should return the number of bytes used by your site. Divide it by 1073741824 to get the value in gigabytes.


  • If you are not technically minded:

To calculate the total size of your site, perform a Backup of each of your site’s courses and add together the size of all the Backup files. 


To Backup your course:

  1. Visit each individual course
  2. Click Settings 
  3. Click Backup 
  4. Once finished, go to Site Administration
  5. Click on Server Files
  6. Select the automated backup
  7. Download the backup file to your computer.
  8. Go to your new MoodleCloud Site 
  9. Click Site Administration
  10. Click Courses
  11. Click Restore Course to upload that file

In addition, you could upload them to a MoodleCloud 45 Day Free Trial to test and see the total file size (the free trial is our smallest site and is limited to 256MB).

*You can learn more about Backup and Restore here.


Here are some things you can do to keep your disk usage low:

Host files on other file storage sites, and then link to them in Moodle using a Resource URL. For instructions on how to do it, please check the following links:

Think about linking/embedding existing websites for your content instead of redeveloping it all from scratch:

  • Use Page and Book Resources (instead of uploading the information as PDF files).
  • Keep the quota for individual user submissions low, to encourage small file submission uploads.