Telnet to your server.
Make an empty database named 'forum'.
cd to directory mysql file is in.

The following assumes:
Your mysql password is: XXXXXXXX
Your empty database is named: forum
The sql file you want to import is named: forum_bup.sql

mysql --password=XXXXXXXX forum < forum_bup.sql

Yes Telnet/SSH is the way to go. My database backup is over 200 meg and once I put the backup on the server and execute the restore command then it takes about 15 seconds or less to restore.

Yup, and to backup it's the same, basically:

mysqldump --opt -c --password=XXXXXXXX -q -v forum > forum_bup-051106am.sql
gzip -v forum_bup-051106am.sql

Then FTP the ZIP file to another server. The key is to get a copy on another drive either within your server (RAID Level 1 - Mirroring) or on another server - Main cause of catestrophic, 'no warning' total data loss is drive failure.

This has also been the best solution for me. The largest database I have imported was 1,4 gb large.

Mine only runs about 300 megabytes - So I'm a little guy.... I have attachments outside the database so that's a secondary backup issue. But - a nightly FTP offsite backup of both attachments and the main forum database can be done with a server cron script. I run freebsd and it's pretty simple.

What do you mean off-site backup?

A backup in a different location. For example, my host is a server farm in Texas. I back up my database every night to my home computer which is 'off site'. If anything happens to them or their server farm, the most I would lose would be a day of posts on my forums.

Just to thank you for the bigdump script... Really usefull ;)