Restoring big courses to the moodle

We have a couple courses, music courses, that are about 200 MB each.  Pretty big.   We have another customer who wanted the courses. 

My first thought was "hell, these files are just too big.  The author should have stored the video on a video server, like YouTube, and referenced them from the course."

I went to their moodle site, logged in with the credentials they gave me.  My account did not have permission to create or restore, so i requested from them a new course where I could restore the course to.  They did that, and I was able to choose Restore from the course admin. block.

I tried to browse to the file on my local drive first, which just say and spun, until I closed it.  Next, I tried the drag and drop from my laptop to the moodle.  This seemed to work better, I got the nice visual of a progress bar.  And, I could see that they had set the max upload file size to 4 GB - which is huge, so I new the problem that ocured was not the result of the file being too big.  I shared my results with my customer and asked them to look in the moodle/php error log and see what it said about the error message.  I then got an email from a new person, probably the moodle admin., saying try it again.  I was able to successfully upload the first course.  Yea.  Probably the issue was the process timing out after 2 minutes or so.  I recall years ago, having solved similar things in our moodles, previous post about this .

During the problem solving process, I also tried splitting the video files from the course, and was able to create a new course backup with just the video, which allowed me to remove the video from the course content.  The file sizes after my splitting were about 140 MB, 60 MB.  My plan was to restore the 140 MB file, and then restore the 60 mb course into the existing.  I have done this with other courses successully - but newer did this trying to solve an Restore problem. 

In the end, I was able to restore each of the two 200 MB courses on their moodle, each in its own course without extracting the large video files.  Which brings me back to original thought, was it a better design decision to include 60 MB worth of video in the course or to have put on dedicated video server?

The end.