Restoring backup, strange characters

[Shaun C]

First of all, let me say I am not a coder, but I do know some technical jargon. I haven't however done much dabbling in MySQL. I moved my forum from its old server to a new server and made an SQL GZIP-compressed backup. Since it exceeded the allowed upload size, I uploaded the database via FTP and used shell to restore the database to the new server. I had to decompress it to do this, though.

It was a perfect move. Well, almost. Unfortunately, something caught my eye. Some less-common characters appeared very strange. For instance, the em dash character — displayed as —. I inspected the database via phpMyAdmin, and indeed, all instances of the em dash were displaying as this in the database itself, which means that the database was to an extent corrupted. (Although only special characters.)

Whilst I could fix the em dashes (most were written by me) by doing a find and replace, some other text in the forum also appears oddly, and I don't know what was originally written. I'm totally confused and I do not know what has caused this. Before I made the server move, I made a personal request to my old host that he keeps the site's files and database on his server in case something goes wrong. Unless you have an idea, I'd better hope he kept his word, else I'm going to have a hard time repairing the database. :(

Thanks.