Kind of funny that this thread came up. I have had som problems with this myself. My site often times out when restoring a backup file from my sites backup-system. Which leaves me with the phpmyadmin. When I did import my site-backup using php-myadmin, the result lost all åäö which are kind of important characters in the Swedish alphabet ;)
Is there some way to fix this? I understand you guys don´t use åäö but maybe you know of some option to change when restoring using php-myadmin. What I did was that I used php-myadmin to restore a backup created from my site. I guess php-myadmin speaks a different language from what the backup-system in my site speaks?
If I restore a backup made with my site I can restore it fine. If I use a backup from my site using php-myadmin I lose the above characters. If I try restoring a *.sql.gz backup created in php-myadmin, from restore on my site, I get a message such as "wrong file format".