Lost data during site migration and restore

[ppetree]

I had to migrate away from hostgator because the shared server I was on was woefully behind. The most current php version I had access to was deprecated so there was no way to migrate to J4. No worries. I decided on a2hosting and started the migration process.

First up was individual backups of all my domains. I used a very popular joomla backup tool and had everything backed up.

Next, I let a2hosting do the migration via cPanel and most everything migrated perfectly. However the main site did not.

No worries. I had my trusty backup.

Problem is, the backup would not restore. I ended up having to roll back to 7.2 version of php to get a restore and even that did not restore all the content from my modules and some menu items were gone. Probably about 1/2 the site was recovered.

My question:
I have raw sql dumps of the entire database (via export). My question is, how do I find content in the mySQL tables that I'd put in the modules or in Gantry5 particles?

[Webdongle]

Three easy steps

1. Install Joomla of the same version (that matches your backed up database) to a new empty database
2. Install to the fresh Joomla all the 3rd party extensions
3. Edit the configuration.php of the new install to connect to your backed up database

#1 Will give you the Joomla files
#2 Will give you the 3rd party files
#3 Gives you a working site.

Best done on localhost.
You just need to know
a. What version of Joomla the database was from (you should be able to see that in one of the tables).
and
b. What 3rd party extensions are in the database you should be able to see that in one of the tables)