Article order incorrect after move

I needed to move 40 articles from one section to another. (All sections use "manual" ordering, not date-based, nor alphabetical).

But what order should I moved them in? Should I move the last article into the new section first, or move the first article in first? To figure this out, I tested it by moving five articles. Using the "Move to" option. I noticed that the first article moved appeared last, the second article moved appeared second-to-last, the third article moved appeared third-to-last, etc., meaning that the most recent move goes to the top. Using that logic, I moved all 40 articles in reverse order so that the articles would be in the correct order upon completion of the move. However, after I moved all articles, none of the order or sequence was correct. Plus, I no longer knew which order the articles were in to fix it. Fortunately, I had an old PDF that showed the order of the article, so I moved each article into the correct sequence.

In the future, how can big move operations retain their article sequence?