girkers
Firstly there is no requirement on anybody here to give you extensive or exacting advice (for free) re how to repair your system, so please do not thrust your "bad attitude" on anyone who responds, irregardless of whether you felt their advice was useful to you or not.
For others that may wish to help so that I can at least get my data out of my system I attempted an upgrade from the ISO but that did not work......
I gave it a good crack and now I am moving on to rebuild, we have the power we have the technology.
Doing a full restore to an already configured system is a big NO NO, as you most likely end up with an inconsistent system that has many orphaned files & folders etc etc etc, & that applies even if your backup is good, & not faulty as yours was.
So, even though it was an inadvertant or accidental action on your part, it creates the situation where the only course of action you can legitimately take is to do a fresh install of SME server from the CD/DVD/USB, & then either Restore from a known good backup or manually set up your system (re-enter users, ibays, data etc).
Regarding recovering your old data etc, the only way to approach that when you have a system that is not fully functional (& assuming you have a 2 disk RAID1 array), is to remove the disks, recreate the server on new disks (or VM) by doing a fresh install from iso media, then attach & mount one of your old disks, then manually copy data & emails & so on from the mounted old disk to your new system.
You are in charge of your system, not us, so you are the one who needs to ensure your backups are good, & that you test & verify them, & even run a complete backup & restore sequence (to a test server) from time to time, to prove to yourself that all your procedures are good etc.
You are also the one who needs to take more care when restoring an individual file.
It is also a good idea to keep numerous independent historical backups (eg use rotating daily backups say 2 or 3 or 4 individual USB drives or whatever your backup system is) so that in the event a particular backup fails or is faulty, then you have an alternative backup to rely on under a worst case scenario.
So please instead of getting annoyed with Charlie & anyone who gives advice, get annoyed with yourself for failing to provide good technical support to yourself.