Thanks Sue, Ken and Emma for helping me think of another way.
I am on 2.13. I do have a 500MB backup of the course I accidentally deleted on my computer(another story see below). I am moving it to one of my repositories and as I type restoring my deleted course from there. My max upload size is 100 MB.
I know some people can not change max file size but do have an FTP program, so this might work for them. I think with newer versions you can drag and drop files like Sue described above
For those who want to learn what happened and a trick if you are quick, here a longer story:
Yesterday morning I was moving courses around in the course management menu system and decided to hide one. Must have been asleep because I clicked on the X right next to the open eye, and then automatically clicked OK before I realized it was the DELETE OK button andd not the OK to move resource I had been doing the previous hour. I frantically hit the cancel button many times. I had other backups but not for this course on my computer.
The trick: I was using Firefox and left it open showing something was processing. I opened a Chrome browser and was able to get into the course and tell it to download the most recent automatic backup. I got lucky because 45 minutes later I had a 500 MB.mbz file on my computer. And when I checked later the course was no longer listed. As usual it another 45 minutes to FTP it back to Moodle and more than an hour to restore (I left it running all night). That was definitely dodging the bullet.
I still curse the "new" file system at times like these but that is progress. However, I still remember 1.5 and when I did a lot of edits in docs.moodle with a quill pen I am 90 minutes from the server and don't like Putty. However I think I better change the max file size to 900MB, next week when the students are gone. AND MAKE SURE I HAVE BACKUPS EVERY COURSE OFF SITE (ie on this computer). We only run a total of 10 courses a year so it is not that big a deal.
Ken and Emma: I was not looking forward to downloading a bunch of trash files. I had a 20 folders with a subfolder containing a file and no quick way to determine what was what. I will re-read Ken's words. Once I downloaded the backup, I found the only file in trash that had a file of exactly the size of the backup, dated today.
Another victory for a forum!!!!