Hello @JenniferDitoro ...
I'm sorry to see that your question has been sitting here in the Community for so long without a response. By this time, I am hoping that you've been able to find a solution that has worked for your needs. However, if this isn't the case, I'd like to offer up an alternative suggestion...
When I worked at a college in Wisconsin as a Canvas administrator, we had a "Master Term" as well as our regular semester terms. Although we also had Canvas Commons available for all our faculty, we didn't really suggest that they save/share their course(s) to Commons each semester. Our faculty were able to copy content either from our "Master Term" or from a previous semester course. For the most part, instructors used these instructions to copy content from one course to another: How do I copy content from another Canvas course using the Course Import tool?.
Another option for you, if you don't have this yet, is to request a "sandbox" course from your school's Canvas administrator (or someone from their Online Learning / eLearning / Distance Education team). Then, you could copy the content from a Fall/Spring/Summer term into your "sandbox" course as a sort of "saved copy" of the course...if that makes sense. That way, you always have access to it as long as you are employed at that school.
And, a third option for you would be to export your course from your school's environment...and then import the export file into the Canvas FFT (Free For Teacher) environment. However, there is a 500 MB limit for FFT courses, so if your course is larger than that, you'd need to figure out what content you'd need to remove to get it below the 500 MB limit (which cannot be increased in FFT).
I hope these idea will give you some things to think about as you plan out how to move forward. Good luck to you!
