J! 3.10.12 to 4.4.2 migration failed; site restored broken backend

[whennegan]

First post!
Experts, thanks in advance for reading, and for all of your input on similar posts I have scoured through before posting here.

I finally had the courage to attempt my migration from 3.10.12 (PHP v8.0) to 4.4.2.
The first place I goofed was not using Akeeba and instead relying on my host's CPanel & server backups.
Second, there were 5-6 plugins with compatibility warnings that I ignored, since I told myself I could revert if something went wrong.
It failed, so I attempted the CPanel home directory restore. That did not complete without errors. My site was back to 3.10.12 but with lots of backend errors.
I asked my host to do a full account restore (not 100% sure what that includes) to 2 days prior. No Improvement.
I noticed file permissions were incorrect on my Joomla directory for some reason, so I corrected that to 755, but we're still not good.
I asked them to re-restore my Joomla SQL DB from the earlier backup, no improvement. Then I read elsewhere here it is best to restore to an empty DB to ensure there's no mix of old/new data, so I had them re-re-restore after that, and added the Joomla account back in with full permissions. Still seeing errors.

Symptoms:
The front end works fine.
On the backend, the control panel, system info, and a few Components pages (e.g. J! Update) work ok.
Most other pages throw an error like this, from "Users > Manage" for example:

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An error has occurred.
Class "JFormFieldPredefinedList" not found

or

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Class "JFormFieldList" not found

or, for the Global Configuration page:

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Call to undefined method Joomla\CMS\Form\Field\PluginsField::getDatabase()

Other errors on the "Joomla Update" page:

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Error
Table '#__joomla.#__history' doesn't exist
Table '#__joomla.#__workflows' doesn't exist
Table '#__joomla.#__workflow_stages' doesn't exist
Table '#__joomla.#__workflow_transitions' doesn't exist
Table '#__joomla.#__mail_templates' doesn't exist
Table '#__joomla.#__guidedtours' doesn't exist
Table '#__joomla.#__user_mfa' doesn't exist

From what I can see, the library PHP files they are looking for do exist, and match what is in the full Joomla original package, and file/user permissions look correct.

Are there other pieces to revert that I am missing?
Would/Should the CPanel account/DB restore method work? If so, should I request an earlier date, or other actions before/after restore is executed?

Thanks so much for your thoughts.

[whennegan]

I resolved this finally today.
In short: I needed to delete my whole Joomla website folder and database from CPanel, then request a restore of both from my host.
I will definitely implement a safer and easier backup solution before this happens again.

[AMurray]

Use Akeeba Backup.....easy restoration with its companion Kickstart.

[toivo]

there were 5-6 plugins with compatibility warnings that I ignored

Check each plugin, not just in JED but from the developer's website, and update or uninstall them before updating to Joomla 4.

As @AMurray mentioned, Akeeba Backup is a good option for backups. The paid Pro version supports offsite data storage of the backup files in cloud services like Amazon, Azure and Google.

[brian]

Use Akeeba Backup.....easy restoration with its companion Kickstart.

You still need to ensure that you restore to a clean (empty) folder. You can not restore on top