All About Linux, Security and Forensics: Backup (mysql dump) all your MySQL databases in separate files

Sometimes we would like to dump all the MySQL databases. MySQL provides an easy solution to this problem:

mysqldump -u root -p --all-databases > all_dbs.sql

However this will dump stuff into one file. How to dump all databses into separate files? Well, here is my solution. A small bash script:

#! /bin/bash

TIMESTAMP=$(date +"%F")

BACKUP_DIR="/backup/$TIMESTAMP"

MYSQL_USER="backup"

MYSQL=/usr/bin/mysql

MYSQL_PASSWORD="password"

MYSQLDUMP=/usr/bin/mysqldump

mkdir -p "$BACKUP_DIR/mysql"

databases=`$MYSQL --user=$MYSQL_USER -p$MYSQL_PASSWORD -e "SHOW DATABASES;" | grep -Ev "(Database|information_schema|performance_schema)"`

for db in $databases; do

  $MYSQLDUMP --force --opt --user=$MYSQL_USER -p$MYSQL_PASSWORD --databases $db | gzip > "$BACKUP_DIR/mysql/$db.gz"

done

Be aware, that in order to execute this script from cron, you need to store password in it (so cron won’t be prompted to provide a password). That’s why, you should not use a root account. Instead just create a new user only for backups, with following privileges:

SHOW DATABASES
SELECT
LOCK TABLES
RELOAD