Creating a new course from selective backup

My customer asked me to help them set up a course with critical content.  We decided on an existing course that had been used for similar content.  I set about creating a new topic at the top of the course and granting my customer correct permissions to edit the course.  She was on her way, creating folders and uploading pdf files into them.  By the end of the day she was happy, her customer was happy.  Credentials were sent out to their customers, everyone was happy.  I could see her customers accessing the course and its content the next day.

Today, another customer who uses the same course approached me today about how her customers who used to use a guest and enrollment key could still get into this course.  She also asked why this very sensitive data was put into her course and not into its own?  I don't have all the background, but needless to say, something needed to change in a hurry, since the second customer had people in the building that morning trying to access the course that used to be avail. via a guess access and enrollment key.

We determined that I should create a new course and place all the documents and folders into it, with the same enrollments that we had added the day before.  I had to create 20 accounts, one each for certain school districts with passwords that required updating upon initial login.

I spend about 15 minutes under the gun creating the new course, creating the top level of folders thinking about the fastest way to move about 40 pdf files from the other course into the new one....

Then it hit me.  Create a backup of the course and choose the user data and only the section that I had added with the folders and files in it.  This course has about 20 sections in it, so I had to scroll down the list in the 3rd step of creating the backup file and deselect all the content except the first section.  This took about 5 minutes total to create the backup file and then restore it as a new course.  The new restored course had the enrollments in place and just the right content.  That was a good solution.

The last step was manually removing the content from the original course.

Moral of the story?

Backup selective course data, including enrollments and restore to create a new course!