by Howard Clinton.
Thanks Howard
I'm a teacher rather than a Moodle tech so did not fully understand what the other posts were trying to do. After a day of pulling my hair out I reluctantly tried an earlier softaculous backup (2.3.1) which has now updated to 2.4.3 (I presume I cannot go back now). The downside is that I did alot of work to the site between the 2.3.1 and 2.3.2 softaculous backups. Luckily this is not a live site regarding student registrations - so nothing lost there. I did notice that the moodledata directory was not complete - didn't match the course structure so don't know if that was relevnt.
anyway thanks again
Howard