Anyone who is responsible for managing a MySQL database will eventually run into this problem. You either need to dump all your MySQL databases for a backup, or to prepare for an upgrade. Whatever your circumstances are there are several different methods that can be employed to dump your MySQL DBs. Hopefully I can give you the basic tools to get you on your way.
Dump All DBs into a Single SQL File
This first method is what I would call the quick and dirty method. It is straight forward and just dumps all of the databases on a server into a single SQL file. For many individuals this is sufficient, but may not be a good option for larger databases or backup/restore processes. Since all of the DBs are bundled into a single file. Each of the values in brackets “[]” are placeholders for your own values.
mysqldump -u [username] -p --all-databases > allDB.sqlIf all you need is to get a quick backup of everything this may be your ticket. The “–all-databases” flag does the magic here, dumping all of the MySQL databases into a single SQL file. More details on this method can be found here. But if you are wanting to be able to easily restore an individual database you may want to use an approach like this.
Dump All MySQL Databases into Individual Files
for I in $(mysql -u [username] -p[mypassword] -h [Hostname/IP] -e 'show databases' -s --skip-column-names); do mysqldump -u [username] -p[mypassword] -h [Hostname/IP] $I > "/home/user/$I.sql"; done
This command first calls “mysql” and gets a list of databases on the server. The command feeds that list of MySQL databases into “mysqldump” to get an individual SQL file for each database on the server. Finally those SQL files are then saved in the location indicated, “/home/user/dbname.sql” in this example.
A few things to note in this command are that first you will notice that I have included the password in the command. The command will complain that using the password on the command line is not safe. However it is required for the command to work. The “-p” is immediately followed by the password, without a space. This is how the option functions, if you add a space it will not work.
The “$I” is a variable and it will have all the database names in it, as it iterates through your listing of DBs. So as you modify the command to fit your specific setup, just make sure to keep that for consistency.
Additional Mysqldump Options
There are a couple of additional mysqldump options that you may want to add depending on your requirements.
--single-transaction
This option keeps mysqldump from trying to get a complete lock on the database. It tells mysqldump to just grab a single transaction and dump the DB contents at the time of that transaction. This can be especially helpful when you are dumping a DB that is especially large, or on a very busy server. Without this option mysqldump may timeout while waiting to get a lock on the DB. For more details on how this option works check out this post.
--default-character-set=utf8mb4
If you are working with data that may contain emoticons you will want this flag. This ensures that your dumped sql file has the correct information to recreate the emoticons when the file gets reimported. Without this option, your emoticons will show up as strange/random text characters when you restore your backup.
Adding Compression
I don’t typically use compression on my SQL dumps since I like to use rdiff-backup as my backup mechanism. But for those who would like to compress their mysqldump in one step here is the basic gist of it.
mysqldump -u [username] -p --all-databases| gzip >allDB.sql.gz
You just pipe the output from the mysqldump command into gzip, or bzip2 to compress the contents. That can be easily added to the command above to dump all MySQL databases into individual files like so.
for I in $(mysql -u [username] -p[mypassword] -h [Hostname/IP] -e 'show databases' -s --skip-column-names); do mysqldump -u [username] -p[mypassword] -h [Hostname/IP] $I | gzip > "/home/user/$I.sql.gz"; done
Hopefully these examples help you get the backups you need. Have some fun along the way.
