Issues upgrading from 2.1 RC4 to 2.1.2

[tethead]

Have a decently large forum (messages table is ~800mb), and have been running 2.1 RC4 for a while. Tried to do the Large Upgrade and it got stuck on "Cleaning up after old UTF-8 languages". It's an English-only forum and we had done the conversion to UTF-8 when moving up from 2.0.x I believe, so not sure why this is happening.

I was able to refresh the page a couple times manually earlier and it thought it finished properly, but then the forum was completely blank except for the banner and my logged-in admin account name. Couldn't do anything.

So, I copied the Large Upgrade files back to the directory via FTP and tried again, and it's now stuck on that same stage again. Can't seem to get passed it.

I do have the backup_smf tables that I can see in phpmyadmin, and they appear to be fine. i don't know how to restore from the backup though, so could use some guidance. would rather just try to force it to install and use the existing tables, as i'm suspecting they are fine, and just some setting got corrupt.

[tethead]

got through the upgrade with CLI, so i'll close this and open a new thread...