mysqldump example

You can use mysqldump to create a simple backup of your database using the following syntax.

mysqldump -u username -ppassword database_name > dump.sql

Replace username with a valid MySQL user ID, password with the valid password for the user (IMPORTANT: no space after -p and the password, else mysqldump will prompt you for password yet will treat the password as database name, so the backup will fail) and database_name with the actual name of the database you want to export. Finally, you can put whatever name you like for the output SQL dump file, here been dump.sql.