MySQL help: I'm not getting all of vb_postindex when moving database?

[Greg-J]

When moving my vB database of 300MB I was continuously getting a 74MB database. After a little investigation I saw that of about 2 million entries in vb_postindex I was only getting about 400,000 of them. I searched around and found that it was likely my Maximal length of created query: option in PhpMyAdmin when exporting being too low so I set it to 50,000 to be safe, but I got exactly the same result. I'm fairly certain the largest single post on my forums is smaller than 50,000 characters (I think my maximum is 10,000 characters), so I am at a loss as to why this happened. I was successful after shutting down mysqld and copying the database files over to the new server, but I would really like to know why it is this happened and how to prevent this from happening in the future.

Any way to better understand the cause and any solution would be very appreciated. Thank you.

[Dean C]

Don't use phpmyadmin to create backups. Use mysqldump

[Greg-J]

Thank you for the reply, but I'm really looking for the why this happens rather than other solutions.

[Awjvail]

The connection is probably timing out. phpmyadmin isn't really reccomended for backing up large databases - mysqldump is much more reliable and you're almost guaranteed to get your entire database.