I attempted to upgrade from OJS 3.1.1-2 to OJS 3.3.0-5 a few days ago. The installation itself completed successfully, but I noticed afterwards that all of the special characters were corrupted during the upgrade. After reading this post (Strange Characters in abstracts since upgrading to OJS 3.2.1.1 (Bootstrap) - #3 by gail), I was pretty sure that I needed to restore from my backup and then try the upgrade again with connection_charset = Off.
I restored a backup through my host server today. Unfortunately, after doing so, I receive the following error when I try to access my site: DB Error: Unknown column 's.section_id' in 'on clause'. I have read that you shouldn’t attempt another upgrade until you fully restore your old OJS system, so I’m a bit stuck. I don’t understand why my backup now contains an error that wasn’t there before.
I know next-to-nothing about MySQL and PHP unfortunately, so this is all a learning process for me. Does anyone have any ideas on what I should do now? How do I get a functioning website back?