In general, Akeeba backups are infallible. I'm used to moving backups between servers blindly, with the kickstart restore or the Unite command line. However, MySQL GEOMETRY fields are a hard case. It seems that MySQL 5.6 - MySQL 5.7 transitions are rough.
Restoring a backup on a MySQL failed due to a POINT field. After searching, it seems that there's no solution, and a POINT field can't be exported and imported between MySQL versions.
# Failed with error: 1416 -- Cannot get geometry object from data you send to the GEOMETRY field
In this particular case, I'm lucky. The extension (JCalPro) that uses the POINT field also stores the original Latitude and Longitude. So, the POINT field "latlng" can be reconstructed with:
UPDATE #__jcalpro_locations SET latlng = GeomFromText(CONCAT(
'POINT(',
latitude,
' ',
longitude,
')'));
A tough nut cracked.
