[support] Backup/Restore strategy

[Scott]

I have a site that has become too large to effectively use the backup
and Migrate module.  I've just finished updating the site from my
development platform and in order to migrate the latest version of the
database I had to exclude the search_index table from the backup.  To
get around this I did backup the search_index table using phpmyadmin and
importing it separately.  Neither drupal nor phpmyadmin would restore
the entire database as a single file.  Does anyone have any
recommendations to improve this situation?

Thanks in advance, Scott