As I was trying the back-up feature of MySQL Administrator, which I think is good since you can backup your database(s) on a scheduled basis. It uses the mysqldump command that comes with MySQL which you can use to manually backup your database to a <filename>.sql file.
After a successful backup test, I am ready to try the restore feature. then when I reached about 95% of restoring the database, I encountered an error “MySQL server has gone away”. Searching the internet for possible answers, I found this.
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=310265#post310265
3. You can also get these errors if you send a query to the server that is incorrect or too large. If mysqld gets a packet that is too large or out of order, it assumes that something has gone wrong with the client and closes the connection. If you need big queries (for example, if you are working with big BLOB columns), you can increase the query limit by starting mysqld with the -O max_allowed_packet=# option (default 1M) or via max_allowed_packet variable in your /etc/my.cnf file and restarting mysql after you edited your /etc/my.cnf file. The extra memory is allocated on demand, so mysqld will use more memory only when you issue a big query or when mysqld must return a big result row.
I changed my max_allowed_packet to 12MB and then tried the restore operation again, this time it works. I’ll try to test this again backup and restore option on my workstation before testing and applying it on the database server.
Posted by port48 
