Exporting Structure and Data (Backup) - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management - page 123

Choosing a character set
It is possible to choose the exact character set for our exported file. phpMyAdmin
verifies that the conditions for recoding are met. For the actual recoding of data, the
PHP component of the web server must support the iconv or the recode module.
The $cfg['RecodingEngine'] parameter specifies the actual recoding engine—the
choices being none , auto , iconv , and recode . If it is set to auto , phpMyAdmin will
first try the iconv module and then the recode module. If set to none , the character
set dialog is not shown.
Kanji support
If phpMyAdmin detects the use of the Japanese language, it checks whether
PHP supports the mb_convert_encoding() multibyte string function. If it does,
additional radio buttons are displayed on the export and import pages and on the
query box, so that we can choose between the EUC-JP and SJIS Japanese encodings.
Here is an example taken from the Export page:
Compression
To save transmission time and get a smaller export file, phpMyAdmin can compress
to ZIP, GZIP, or BZIP2 formats. These formats are offered only if the PHP server
has been compiled with the --with-zlib (for ZIP and GZIP) or --with-bz2 (for
BZ2) configuration option respectively. The following parameters control which
compression choices are presented in the panel:
$cfg['ZipDump'] = TRUE;
$cfg['GZipDump'] = TRUE;
$cfg['BZipDump'] = TRUE;