Back up and Restore

Hi there,
My wordpress was acting up a couple of months ago and it was thought that my permissions were off. It turned out it was just my server. So because I was messing around with my permissions and such, WordPress is unable to upgrade via the dashboard. So I was thinking that perhaps I should uninstall wordpress and reinstall it fresh, but I would like to keep my pages and posts intact. I was looking through the guides on how to do that but I am not sure I fully understand it…
Any help on this would be great, thank you =).