by Doug Osborne.
I have the same question, for a slightly different reason. Due to an upgrade from 1.9 to 2.4 I need to update the course content, while maintaining the grades/progress information for the users. The changes will take 2+ days to make, and we can't afford that downtime to make the on the live server, so we need to make them on a staging server then restore on the live server. I've searched all over, haven't found an answer, and also posted with no response. Will someone at least say "I don't know?"
If it can't be done through Moodle's backup/restore system, can it be done by overwriting a database table?