I often need to make a quick backup of one mysql database. This happens right before there will be some major changes to the database, or before performing an upgrade on the mysql server software. Now I don’t recommend this to be done regularly, but still, I use this extensively in this kind of situations… If you are looking for an automated solution to backup your databases you might want to check my other post: “Backup your MySQL databases automatically”
MySQL provides us the tool required to do this: mysqldump. As the name implies, this can make a dump of one database or even to all the databases on the server. You can see all the options on its help manual or on the mysql site.

Basically this is used like:

mysqldump [OPTIONS] database [tables]
mysqldump [OPTIONS] --databases [OPTIONS] DB1 [DB2 DB3...]
mysqldump [OPTIONS] --all-databases [OPTIONS]

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