Using pipes and redirection in the shell we can do backups or restore them, performing compression or decompression on the fly, this are the commands I frequently use:
Create a backup with mysqldump and compress the stream with bzip2
ivan@mini:~$ mysqldump –h dbHost –u dbUser –pdbPass –add-drop-database –databases <dbname> | bzip2 > dbName-02-17-2010.sql.bz2</dbname>
If I want to restore the backup I use:
ivan@mini:~$ bunzip2 < dbName-02-17-2010.sql.bz2 | mysql –h dbHost –u dbUser –pdbPass
I can switch bzip2 compression by changing only the program name for example gzip/gunzip lzma/unlzma
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