Upgrading to wordpress 3.5 erased all posts and custom posts

No points for this, please, but in case you do not get an answer here, find Aaron Brazell on Facebook.  Tell him I sent you.  You'll have to pay for his support, but he wrote the book, literally, on WordPress.  Right now he is moving from Austin to Baltimore so he may be a little distracted, but if there is a quick fix, he will know about it.

Thanks for the suggestion ray, I will try him tough I am not sure I can afford a specialist.

Has anyone had this happen? or know what caused this? How would I go about upgrading now without erasing all content?

This shouldn't happen but it's almost impossible to know why it happened.  Things like custom post types and sliders are theme dependent.  Posts are pure database and shouldn't have been touched.

What I would do is a manual upgrade: download 3.5 and use FTP to copy the new files into place.

Ok i reverted back to my backup and started over. this time I did a manual update and followed the step by stem instructions from wordpress.org and this time everything goes ok until i try to go to the admin area after the update. it forces me to do a database upgrade which I cannot skip and when it is done it shows the following error:

WordPress database error: [Table 'db446353270.wp_categories' doesn't exist]
SELECT * FROM wp_categories ORDER BY cat_ID

WordPress database error: [Table 'db446353270.wp_post2cat' doesn't exist]
SELECT post_id, category_id FROM wp_post2cat GROUP BY post_id, category_id

WordPress database error: [Table 'db446353270.wp_linkcategories' doesn't exist]
SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM wp_linkcategories

WordPress database error: [Unknown column 'link_category' in 'field list']
SELECT link_id, link_category FROM wp_links

Update Complete

Your WordPress database has been successfully updated!

After that, all of my custom posts, woocommerce products, subscriptions, users, EVERYTHING, turns into regular posts. meaning i had about 72 regular posts (blog articles) and after the database update I have 342 posts (and by their name I can see that they are what all the other things used to be), and now all my products and custom posts are empty.

any ideas??

Thanks

Which plugins are you running?

The list is long but this happens even when I turn them off and then update.

The main ones are:

Custom Content Type Manager
Advanced Custom Fields
Woocommerce (with added extensions)
Event Espresso (with added extensions)

I've requested that this question be closed as follows:

Accepted answer: 0 points for James-Wise's comment #a38729930
Assisted answer: 500 points for jason1178's comment #a38729682

for the following reason:

found a workaround myself. seemed to have worked.

I spoke too soon.

Widgets don't work. I can't open them or move them at all...

Stopping auto-close as problem is still present.

Can you run Firebug and see where the JavaScript errors are?

Edit: Just noticed you opened a new Q. What do you want to do about this one?

Sorry. I thought since i accepted solution you will not get the last added notice. You can close this one. I will reply on the other one. (still new here)

Thanks!

You need to close it.  I can't.

Solution ended up being the following:<br /><br />So i just went into the database, changed it to db_version to 22441 and now it didn't ask to update my db. everything else works so it seems to be ok. I'm sure i might have problems with the next update but for now I have had enough of trying to figure this out...