Suspending an enrollment...what does this mean?

Today, I stumbled across a nice little hidden, at least to me, gem in moodle.  How to *hide and enrollment when a student completes the course.

Our situation has been like this.  A student completes a course, the course is backed up and the student is un-enrolled from the course.  If we need to look up the students course data, like grades or access, we have to restore the course, usually to another moodle instance.  This is stupid for a number of reasons, like when the course is backed up, it backs up all the students, so when the course is restored, it restores all the students, not just the one un-enrolled.  You follow?

This is because our customer insists that the student not be visible in the course when they complete the course.  This requirement makes some sense, since we have an open enrollment model where students can enroll at any time during the year.  Anyway...

I have been trying to find a means of hiding the enrollment when the student completes the course.  I even created a completed role, where I was removing practically every privilege.  I tried creating a group called completed and moving the completed students account into the completed group, which hides it from other students, but does not hide it in the course.

Today, I found this moodle doc that describes the enrollment as having a status.  Go figure.  The enrollment itself can be suspended.  When the enrollment is suspended, it does not appear in the course.  Or in the participants list or any other enrollment report.

Here is the blog that I stumbled across that talked about this feature.  Here is another blog post about this hidden gem.  And yet another on this feature of suspending the enrollment and what it actually does. This is the moodle doc page that describes the feature.

From Peter Skoda, a moodle heavy hitter...

"Suspended users can not login, but teacher can enrol them, etc. It is a temporary prevention of login. They also do not receive any messages from moodle."

This is another very well documented conversation about the intention of suspend -vs- un-enroll.  Where the consensus is to NOT un-enrol.