Questions for re-installing the forum

[Rabso]

Hi,

during my trail in solving the issues with UTF-8 language, I have converted all my database from "latin1_general_ci" to "utf8_unicode_ci".

At this time I am not feeling comfortable for this step as another issue appeared. I am planning to re-install my forum and I have the following questions:

1. As stated my forum use UTF-8 language, as per my understanding the database table should be "utf8_unicode_ci", please confirm.
2. to use the UTF-8, shall I check the charset option in config file?
3. I don't need to lose all my forum settings, template modification and any other changes I have made. Is backing up the current database and then merge it after the re-install will do so?
4. If yes, as per above the database was "latin1_general_ci" and I converted then to "utf8_unicode_ci" using php codes, does this will effect on the marge process?

thank you