[webmastersun]

Originally Posted by msoms

I followed the normal mysqldump commands to backup and restore several times and in several types however, the site will always show strange text encoding.

There are some works to do before moving your database to a new server that support and keep same encode, that is:
- Select utf8 unicode ci for your database.
- Enable force to use utf8 in your config file
- Change encode to utf8 in your tool/program that you are using to move your database.

This will help you to avoid errors about special characters/symbol when moving vB databases.