Backup Migrate does not handle special characters well

Do you have phpmyadmin? Can you look at the encoding of the tables after the import? What version of MySQL are you running?

The backup files have some headers in them that should be switching the encoding to UTF-8 before the import, but it's possible that it's not working in your set up for some reason.

I have similar issue with 7.x-2.1
When database is created, it has all table collations set to utf8_general_ci
If i make backup sql with the module and then restore to it, it converts all tables in database to collation latin1_swedish_si, and it seem's don't support some characters.

I have an error right after restoring:
Notice: unserialize() [function.unserialize]: Error at offset 424 of 1081 bytes in backup_migrate_item->load_row() (line 315 of D:\Projects\WEB\LoveBanya\Working_dir\trunk\sites\all\modules\backup_migrate\includes\crud.inc).

I believe it could be fixing easy, if you just add default charset to table creation sql (phpMyAdmin does so)

I think this is fixed in the latest dev.

I also cannot restore a site with a backup file made from backup and migrate. There are people with special characters in their names, such as Ö, ğ Ç, ç. I can export the database and import it with mysql but backup and migrate gives me an error that mentions htmlspecialchars and check_plain.

@dsoini Is the error on backup or on restore? Can you post the wording of the error?

I'm having this same problem with encoding of special characters in the exported backup with the latest 7.x dev version. I'm seeing the strange characters in the exported file in a text editor. If I open the file in jEdit and manually save as UTF-8, characters such as apostrophes display correctly.

I'm on Drupal 8 and I had this problem after I manually copied and pasted all of my Drupal 7 site's content (because I could not get a migration to work) into Drupal 8. Apostrophes, dashes and the copyright symbol turned into question marks. (And there are a lot of apostrophes in a page of text!) I believe that most of the content that turned out this way had originally been written (by contributors) in MS Word.

I had to manually edit nearly every piece of content to take out the question marks, and I also pasted the content into Notepad and saved it before copying and pasting it back into the Drupal editor. It looks fine on my dev site, which has the character encoding set to utf8mb4_general_ci.

So, I'm nearly finished with the dev site only to discover that I cannot save and re-import this database without once again having question marks replace all the apostrophes. I have tried via Mysql and via the backup and migrate module. Mysql is set to export as UTF-8. I'm on Windows using wamp64. I also set up a site with XAMPP and got the same result when I imported the database.

I'm worried that if I continue with this site, I may have this problem again if I ever have to restore the next site from a backup.

I found many posts about this sort problem, but no solutions.

This is maddening - why can't I export the content that looks perfect on my D8 dev site into another D8 site without having these issues?

I can only respond to your D8 to D8 migration. You should have a look into https://www.drupal.org/node/2749885 . The patch is integrated into the current dev-release, but not in 8.x-4.0-alpha1.

@szeidler Thank you for this. I lost many hours of work because of this behavior. It did not just affect foreign language characters, but things like smart quotes, em dashes and other symbols. I did make backups using both mysql and b&m module, but I will try again using the dev. version. I sure hope it works!

Can anyone verify if this bug still exists in in the newest 7.x-3.2?

Closing after more than two weeks with no activity.