It is now 4 am the SECOND day I have not slept trying to get this moodle to restore.
We were told to reduce files (inodes were over the (100,000 soft limit, but the hard limit was 250,000). We removed files and got it around 85,000.
Tried again and it still didn't work. I tried many things including backing up the old course 4 times and repeatedly retrying the process.
Finally, I removed all data from the server and restarted from scratch (from the beginning of making the database).
I used the newest Moodle version (yes, I changed my PHP config to 7.0 before i started any of this).
After spending another hour getting Moodle on the host server, I gave the restore another shot and it is STILL doing the same thing. Uploads the file, as I can watch it hit 100% but when it goes to connect to the server, it just freezes. The path it is going to looks good. I followed a video tutorial every step of the way, and NOTHING went wrong this time (I had a few things to fix yesterday when I did it the first time, which is why I decided to try again from scratch today).
I don't know where to go from here.