Restoring blob fileds in Mysql

Not really a rails question but someone on here may be able to help…

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

The backups have appeared to work fine…

I then wanted to restore one of the backups to a different named
database so I did: mysql myNewDatabaseName -u root < myBackupFile.sql

I got some errors about logfile size so I stopped Mysql and removed
the logfiles and set the following parameters in the my.ini file and
restarted mysql.

innodb_log_file_size=64M
innodb_log_buffer_size=8M

The restore now completes with no errors but one of the three tables
which contains blobs is never restored.
My max-allowed-packet is set to 32M

The database backup size is about 2.2 GB the majority of that size
being in the table that does not restore. If I run a mysqldump on the
restored database the size is 185 MB.

I really need to have a bombproof way to backup and restore as my
existing backups appear worthless. I am particularly concerned that it
“fails silently” with no error log entries as far as I can see.

Is yaml_db reliable for blobs?
The environment is windows server 2003 sp2

Any help appreciated!

George