database size?

when backed up

[Doood]

(nevermind, I was looking at the old unzipped file and new gzipped file)

The size of my database has doubled since this time last year, but the backed up and gzipped database size is half of what it was last year. It makes me wonder if I'm getting the whole database in the backup.

Since the database is quite large, I can't back it up from phpmyadmin. So I'm using ssh and saving it as a .sql file and then gzipping it. Shouldn't it be almost double the size since the database is double the size?

From phpmyadmin it says the database is 40.8MB and when gzipped and on my home computer it's 3412KB. Does that seem like right?

[AprilS]

What you've described is not uncommon - especially for DBs like Oracle, MySQL, etc. Assuming your database is composed of mainly "raw" text - it can be greatly compressed.