Export Brightspace packege

Lennon.S.2760

Hi everyone!
I have a question I hope you can help me with.

At the company where I work, we exported a Brightspace package and imported it into another platform to apply translations, corrections, and other updates. After finishing that, I exported the updated package and tried to re-import it back into the original platform.

However, when I do this, the files are always duplicated instead of being replaced.
Does D2L Brightspace not allow existing files to be automatically overwritten during import? Just to clarify, these are not calendar items or anything that affects grades — they are just content pages for reading. We went through this process because it was easier for our subject-matter experts to review and update the content on the other platform without damaging the original files and pages.

I just wanted to confirm if this is expected behavior.
Thanks in advance for your help!

Raquel.B.1893

Hi Lennon,

Thank you for bringing up this topic.

Yes, your observation is correct — Brightspace does not automatically overwrite existing files or content pages during a course package import. According to D2L’s official documentation:

Import, export, or copy course components - Brightspace

“If you import course components with names that already exist in the course, or you import multiple components with the same name, duplicate names appear; they are not overwritten.”

For example, if your course contains a discussion topic called Exam Review and you import a course package that contains a discussion topic called Exam Review, your course will contain two topics called Exam Review. When importing a grade scheme, a scheme not associated to a grade item within the course offering is only copied if the grade scheme is unique (i.e. there are no duplicates which match on name and ranges).

This behavior is by design to prevent accidental data loss. If your goal is to update existing content, you would need to either:

• Manually delete the old content before importing the updated version, or
• Replace files individually by dragging and dropping the updated file into the appropriate module in the Content tool, which does support overwriting.2

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Best regards, Raquel