Tux Training

Do you need to change your web host or switch your database server? This is probably the only time when you really think of backing up your MySQL data. If you’ve got a website with a database or your custom database running for your applications, it is imperative that you make regular backups of the database. In this article, I will outline two easy ways of backing up and restoring databases in MySQL.

The easiest way to backup your database would be to telnet to the your database server machine and use the mysqldump command to dump your whole database to a backup file. If you do not have telnet or shell access to your server, don’t worry about it; I shall outline a method of doing so using the PHPMyAdmin web interface, which you can setup on any web server which executes PHP scripts.

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After you have dumped out your data into a file as described here, FTP or scp that dump file to the home directory (/) on our system.

Once you have uploaded the dump file to your account here, get a shell prompt on our system using telnet or ssh.
Now import the dump file into MySQL by typing all the following on 1 single line at the shell prompt:

mysql -p -h DBSERVER dbname < dbname.sql

The above assumes that your database name on our system is “dbname” and the dumpfile that you uploaded was named “dbname.sql“. Replace those with your correct database name and dumpfile filename. Also replace DBSERVER with your correct database server name.