Kickstart is NOT a restoration script
Kickstart is the backup archive extraction tool. It only extracts the backup archive. It has nothing to do with the database restoration and the site reconfiguration. That is handled by BRS, the restoration script which was included in your backup archive at backup time.
This information is printed on your screen every time you run Kickstart, explained in our video tutorials, and included in several documentation pages.
Therefore, the important question is which version of Akeeba Backup took that backup. If it was way too old – we're talking before November 2024 – it did not have the Normalize Collation feature and you're stuck.
If this is the case, you will have to restore on a server with an older MySQL version, upgrade Akeeba Backup, take a new backup, and use that to transfer your site.
This is not as hard as it sounds, especially if you use a Dockerised web server stack where you can select whichever version of Apache, PHP, and MySQL works for you. I have used that stack I linked here to restore everything from Joomla 1.5 backups taken back in 2010 up to a Joomla 6.2 beta 1 backup taken today – and everything in between. Any machine with 16 GB of RAM is enough to run it; the stack itself takes up under a Gigabyte of RAM, but Docker Desktop requires at least 4 GB of free memory to be useful (I assume you're on Windows or a Mac; on Linux you just need the extra ~700 MB of free memory, which is pretty much always the case, even on an 8 GB machine).
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer and Director
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