by Ken Task.
Now we're off into areas that only you can answer for yourself cause not everyone's situation is the same.
Obviously, you don't want to have to do what you did to recover a backup.
Here's what I might do if I wasn't under a records retention policy or something like that ...
Full backup of the course ... including students enrolled and their work.
Download that backup to archive it ... I can restore that course if needed.
Do another backup this time with no users no data from users, etc. It's a course shell with the activities/links, etc. in it.
Download that backup for archiving purposes.
After doing both of those, delete the backups found by going to restore in the course.
Now reset the course. Choose options to remove all students, their data, their forum postings, their files, their grades, etc. It then becomes like it was before you allowed students to enroll.
Some catch 22's ... iF the full/user backup you've downloaded to archive is larger than the limits to upload, can't use it until upload limits increased. On some shared remotely hosted situations you don't control that limit. There's a CAP. Probably only option is to upgrade the package ... shared hosting to VPS.
The same could be true of the no user backup you downloaded.
See what I mean?
'spirit of sharing', Ken