Database Backup Differences and Timeouts

[nlites]

I've had problems on different hosts with the Back Office DB backup timing out and leaving incomplete backup files.

Different backup methods take very different times, and even produce file sizes, on the same site:-

* Back Office backup takes over 6 minutes (without download) and produces a sql.bz2 file which decompresses to 1.1GiB

* cPanel > Backup > MySQL takes abt 10 secs to download a sql.gz file which decompresses to 892MB

* phpMyAdmin > Export takes 2 min 20 secs to create and download a sql file of 1.1GiB

Why is the Back Office backup so much slower?

Why is the cPanel backup so fast and producing a smaller sql file?

Are they all equally good for restoring the database?
(I've never installed or restored one myself - I would get someone more experienced to do that, but I want to know I've got a good backup to give them).

[tomerg3]

There are different compression methods, though for files, it shouldn't have a big difference in size.

When it comes to DB export, there are different ways of doing it, which includes different ways of inserting data (some include more text), which wold explain the difference in size.

The result of an import should be the same.

It's always best to ensure you know how to use a backup, and safely restore it before you're in a situation where you need to do it.

[nlites]

My hosting fixed the issue by putting the following code in my: .../public_html/admin.../.htaccess

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

    RewriteEngine On

    RewriteRule .* - [E=noabort:1,E=noconntimeout:1]

</IfModule>

Which I see is suggested by LiteSpeed at: https://www.litespeedtech.com/support/wiki/doku.php/litespeed_wiki:php:run-without-timeouts 

and: https://docs.litespeedtech.com/cp/cpanel/long-run-script/ 

But just to be on the safe side I'm going to do one of the cPanel backups in addition to the PrestaShop one each time.