Heh, FireFly you seemed to misunderstand my scenario in Post #1, because I'm on a localhost, as in I've got Vbulletin installed on my computer. When I try to use telnet or putty to make connections to my localhost, in order to make a backup, my computer refuses connection. My guess is that you can't make telnet connections to your computer (it seems logical). Is there anyother way of backing up?
And restoring from phpmyadmin when you have a large database I've heard is not the safest thing to do..then again, I'm on localhost so maybe it will be fine.