Backing up and restoring partial course content

My customer called me this am and said something like this:

"in our civics course some of the quizzes work but others do not.  they appear all jumbled up".  Upon further investigation, she was right.  The last 6 quizzes in our civics course all rendered the same way, jumbled up. 

The good news was that on our content server, the quizzes were fine, no jumbling.  We get some of our courses from 3rd party vendors, like this one, and load them onto a separate server, a content server, where we format the course and do some other things to it before backing it up and restoring to our live server.

After verifying that all 6 of the quizzes rendered correctly on the content server, I performed the following steps on the live server

Steps performed in merging course backup into existing course

1. backed up the civics course (just in case)
2. deleted student attempts in the quizzes that were not rendering
3. deleted the quizzes
4. browsed to the content server
5. opened the civics course
6. created a backup
7. in step 3 (i think) of the backup, choose only the quizzes that were not rendering in the live course
8. completed the backup
9. saved the backup file to a share drive, accessible to the live server
10. browsed to the civics course on the live server
11. choose restore
12. browsed to the backup file on the shared server
13. selected the Merge Into This Course option
14. completed the restore

Once the restore was complete, I had to move the quizzes into the correct location and reset timers.

I checked each quiz to be sure it rendered properly.  I am a hero to my customer.  Sometimes, moodle makes me look good, I like that.

Moral of the story?  Moodle has a nice facility where you can select the items in a course while backing up and a nice facility that allows merging backups into existing courses.  I do not know why the quizzes were not rendering  properly, but sometimes, you just go with the fix and move on.