fix magento website broken when upgrading modules

I used magentoconnect admin function to upgrade the modules that said they were out of date, and now the site gives an internal server error. The website has several custom modules, so you can't just reinstall. I'm not sure if my backup has the latest version of the custom modules. The original error I was trying to fix was a "geocode" error. Probably related to one of the modules that tracks user IP addresses being out of date or misconfigured. It is magento 1.9x I had thought that I had made a full backup prior to trying to upgrade, but it turns out that my backups of the magento directory was incomplete. I might have a full backup of the /var directory, but I'm not sure. Hopefully the problem can be repaired without resorting to backups, again because of the custom scripting for some modules in the store.