Calculating your site size when migrating to MoodleCloud

Modified on Tue, 07 Nov 2023 at 11:16 PM

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 time-limited MoodleCloud Free Trial site to test and see the total file size (the limited-time Free Trial is limited to 250MB and 50 users).


*Find more about Course backup and Restore, and how to optimise your MoodleCloud site storage.


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