Backup MySQL Database to a file

Backing up your database is a very important system administration task, and should generally be run from a cron job at scheduled intervals. We will use the mysqldump utility included with mysql to dump the contents of the database to a text file that can be easily re-imported.
Syntax:

mysqldump -h localhost -u root -pmypassword databasename > dumpfile.sql

Example:

mysqldump -h localhost -u root -p2Uad7as9 database01 > dumpfile.sql

This will give you a text file containing all the commands required to recreate the database.