As of July 2025, Virginia Tech has implemented the Canvas Archiving tool by K16 Solutions (purchased from Instructure) to support long-term course content management. This tool enables the university to store copies of course sites outside of our core Canvas system but keep them accessible online. 

With Canvas in use at Virginia Tech for over 10 years and over 210,000 total courses in the system, archiving content will streamline course lists for instructors, ensure we stay within contractual storage limits for Canvas content, and improve overall system performance. This initiative is a proactive step towards managing Canvas content in a sustainable way for the future.

Course sites that were automatically created through the university’s Registrar/HokieSPA timetable system - typically with a Course Request Number (CRN) and auto-added student enrollments - and taught up through Summer 2022 will be archived starting in July 2025. 

Explore the Historic Timetable if you need to check if your courses were on the timetable system.

Please note that per department request, some courses don't get Canvas sites, which means that they are not included in the archive. If you used a site to teach one of the following courses, it was likely a manually created Canvas site:

• 5904 and 6904 (graduate project and report) courses
• 5964, 6864, 7864, 7944, X974 (independent study) courses
• X994 (undergraduate research) courses
• VTC, VCOM, and REG courses

The archive process will only be run on provisioned courses in canvas.vt.edu, so PDN courses are not affected in any way. 

During the first year, courses prior to 2022 will be archived. Courses will only be archived initially and can be restored upon request. 

Beginning in the summer of 2026, Canvas courses will remain active for four years, will be stored in the archive for another four years, and then will be purged from the archive. This model will ensure that all Canvas courses are retained, either in an active or archival state, for at least eight years in total.

Official course sites will have an associated SIS ID in the site’s settings. See Identifying Official Course Sites above for more information.

Courses that were manually created (such as sandbox, project, or training sites not linked to the Registrar) do not have a SIS ID and will not be archived.

Yes - archived courses can be restored up to 4 years from the archived date.

See Requesting Restoration of Course Sites.

The time it will take depends on the size of the course site contents, but it should take less than an hour of processing time even for a very large site (anything over 15 GB).

When a course is restored from the archive, all content included in the archive will be recovered. The archive is comprehensive, so all content should be restored.

Content from third-party tools, also known as Canvas integrations or Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) applications, is not stored directly in Canvas. Instead, this data resides on the vendor’s platform. If restored course content contains links to these tools, for example in a Canvas assignment, they will continue to work as long as the vendor still retains the data, assuming that we still have a current agreement in place with the vendor and the integration is still supported in Canvas. To confirm data availability, please contact the vendor for details on how long content is available for their tool.

Courses can be restored up to 4 years from the archived date. Submit the Learning Management System (Canvas) form to request your site to be unarchived.

Only manually created sites can be deleted upon request by submitting the Learning Management System (Canvas) form. Official course sites can only be archived. Being in the archive implies eventual deletion, but only after 8 years have passed since the course was taught.

No, restored courses will not be automatically re-archived unless a request was made to move the course back into the archive. Our current process is designed to run the archiving operation once per semester in a one batch. If a course is archived during the initial process and later restored, it will not be archived again unless requested. Please note that  archiving helps to maintain the overall health of the system, so we encourage everyone to ask for restoration judiciously. 

There will not be notifications for courses about to be archived. The initial archive process to archive courses prior to 2022 will take several months to complete.

No, there is no opt-out process. All provisioned/official courses will be archived when the time comes to process the courses for the given semester; see the tentative schedule. However, you may export course content at any time and save it (in your preferred location) prior to the archive copy being made.

Keep in mind that official records of students and grades are housed in Banner, not in Canvas. If you regularly copy your course content into new sites each semester, there is no need to unarchive older sites to access that content. Use the most recent copy to move content into new sites.