How to reliably restore MySQL blobs

Question

I have been backing up a MySQL database for several years with the command: mysqldump myDatabaseName -u root > myBackupFile.sql

The backups have appeare

Answer 1

I managed to back up and restore the blobs by using the following mysqldump command:

mysqldump --opt  --skip-extended-insert --max_allowed_packet=128M -u root myDB > filename

Not sure if it’s specifying max_allowed_packet on the command line or the skip-extended-insert that did the trick.

I assumed that my max_allowed_packet of 32M was being used, but I think that in the mysql config file it is in the [mysqld] section and so probably does not apply to dump.

I still don’t understand why I got no errors on either the dump or the restore.