Your right the backup/restore is not an ideal solution.
This is a good question which would be handy to do, that is to be able to export product/menu and import similarly to what you can do with rules etc in the database tools. To allow a large menu update like this to be prepared offsite and loaded quickly in one go.
A quick search has shon a solution using SQL itself but not sure how comfirtable you might be with using that?