The one thing that irks me is that that the importing of the databases failed, but that is for me to follow up with the Hosting Company.
Just a guess here, but someone might have been thinking of a content import at the Dashboard rather than realizing a database import has farther-reaching implications. And as to the matter of database backups, the deal there is be certain wp-config and the database name and table_prefix all match as they should and that the database already knows the path to/from the wp-config file. In my own case, I use phpMyAdmin > "Synchronize" to place a database (tables) clone in a separate database, and then in an emergency I can either just quickly change the database name and user in wp-config to use the clone or else export the tables from the clone and import them into the original database after having dropped its tables.