By the way, thanks for all of the help you have all given me so far. I seem to have yet another question.
I have managed to get a full backup of both of my courses. One I have been able to restore on another system, so I know I have a good backup. The second hangs during restore. The screen just goes white.
Research has turned the following up as a possible solution:
....have been able to backup and restore large courses 800 meg+ with these settings.
Warning - once complete change back to your current settings as this does not work well in a production environment. it leaves everything running for a long time and eventually runs out of resources and has to be rebooted.
change this in the php.cfg file
max_execution_time =19200
max_input_time = 1500
max_input_vars = 8000
memory_limit = 1024M
post_max_size = 1200M
upload_max_filesize = 1000M
max_file_uploads = 30
FastCGI Settings
Activity Timeout 3600
idle Timeout 3600
Queue Length 2000
Request Timeout 3600
Would temporarily making these changes be likely to help. (Fortunately, the moodle installations I am running host only my two classes, so any possible damage is limited to me. )
And are their any other settings anywhere that might also possibly help moodle chug through the backup and restore of a large class?
Note: At the same time, I am working on the problem from the other direction. I am finding ways to place larger files somewhere outside my courses and then simply link to them. (Dropbox is my first choice here) My goal is to keep all future classes clear of video and other files that seem large enough to create these sorts of problems in the future.