I could be wrong, but it seems IMHO (I am surely no DBa), unnecessary to let a DB restore process (from backup) use the binarylog. On large DBs it can cause purging of actually useful binary log information (due to log rotation and maxsize configs) or worse yet, as it happened in my case:
I had 7GB free on the server and the DB being restored from backup is about 3GB. When I initiated the restore process, the step “Creating MySQL database mydb” took well over 5 minutes then stopped with the error “ERROR 1114 (HY000) at line 12566: The table ‘mytable’ is full”. This error usually indicates that the disk is out of space, and that was the case. The bin log grew so big because of the restore operation that it took all the disk space available.
MySQL manual states that “A client that has the SUPER privilege can disable binary logging of its own statements by using a SET sql_log_bin=0 statement. See Section 5.1.4, “Server System Variables”.”, so it should be trivial to implement this.