Backing Up and Restoring Your MySQL Database - What about Multiple Databases?

If you are a database administrator who has to look after multiple databases, you'll need to back up more than one database at a time. Here's how you can backup multiple databases in one shot.
If you want to specify the databases to backup, you can use the --databases parameter followed by the list of databases you would like to backup. Each database name has to be separated by at least one space when you type in the command. So if you have to backup 3 databases, let say Customers, Orders and Comments, you can issue the following command to back them up. Make sure the username you specify has permissions to access the databases you would like to backup.

Backup and Restor Mysql Server On Centos 5

Backing Up and Restoring Your MySQL Database

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.

Playing with mysqldump
If you have either a shell or telnet access to your database server, you can backup the database using mysqldump. By default, the output of the command will dump the contents of the database in SQL statements to your console. This output can then be piped or redirected to any location you want. If you plan to backup your database, you can pipe the output to a sql file, which will contain the SQL statements to recreate and populate the database tables when you wish to restore your database. There are more adventurous ways to use the output of mysqldump.

Clonezilla, Opensource "Ghost" Way

You're probably familiar with the popular proprietary commercial package Norton Ghost®. The problem with these kind of software packages is that it takes a lot of time to massively clone systems to many computers. You've probably also heard of Symantec's solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition® with multicasting. Well, now there is an OpenSource clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting!

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partclone and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC's Classroom C, Clonezilla SE was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

Backing Up Your Data - Do's and Don't and How To's

About the Author
Korey Bachelder is the owner of MediaRECOVER, a provider of data recovery software and restore service provider. When your backups fail (or you failed to make one), MediaRECOVER software will get your important information and images back from virtually any storage medium.


We all know we're supposed to back up data. Sometimes we might actually do so. Backing up your data is important, and yet it is often a neglected part of using computers. Data can be lost rather easily. Human error, a virus, or simply a computer crash can wipe out important documents, photos, contact lists and more.

Backing up your data is important to everyone, not just businesses. Imagine all those photos you took of your children growing up, now sitting on your hard drive. What about your video and music collection? Perhaps you've heard about entire collections of documents lost from your friends' or coworkers' computers. The stories are haunting. All those years of searching and collecting of that data, and it can be wiped out in an instant. Could you ever replace all that information?