If you’ve been using MySQL database to store your important data, it is imperative that you make a backup of your data to prevent any loss of data. This article shows you how to backup and restore data in your MySQL database. This process can also be used if you have to move your data to a new server.
Backing up your database
The quickest and easiest way to backup and restore your database would be to use MySQLDump. If you’ve got shell or telnet access to your server, you can backup MySQL data by issuing the mysqldump command. The syntax for the command is as follows.
mysqldump -u [uname] -p [pass] [dbname] > [backupfile.sql]
[uname] – this is your database username
[pass]- this is the password for your database
[dbname] – the name of your database
[backupfile.sql] – the filename for your database backup
To backup your database ‘Customers’ with the username ‘sadmin’ and password ‘pass21’ to a file custback.sql, you would issue the command
mysqldump -u sadmin -p pass21 Customers > custback.sql
Issuing this command will backup the database to custback.sql. This file can be copied to a safe location or a backup media and stored. For more information on MySQLDump, you can check out : http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/mysqldump.html
Restoring your database
If you have to re-build your database from scratch, you can easily restore the mysqldump file by issuing the following command. This method will not work if the tables already exist in your database.
mysql - u sadmin -p pass21 Customers < custback.sql
If you need to restore existing databases, you’ll need to use MySQLImport. The syntax for mysqlimport is
mysqlimport [options] database textfile1
To restore your previously created custback.sql dump back to your Customers Database, you’d issue
mysqlimport -u sadmin -p pass21 Customers custback.sql
For more information on MySQLImport, you can check out: http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/mysqlimport.html