Moving a MySQL installation?

[Jonathan Arnold]

Don Levey wrote:
> I'm upgrading a home machine, which in practice involves simply building
> a new machine and moving things over to the bigger, faster box.  Not
> being much of a MySQL person, but using it as the back end of a number
> of things (Gallery2, Amarok, and others), I find myself needing to move
> the old data to the new machine or recreate it.  I envision three
> possibilities, in decreasing levels of desirability:
> 
> 1) Take the data files and move them wholesale to the new machine.  If
> this is possible, everything comes over at once and when I start sqld
> everything "just works".
> 
> 2) Export all the databases, and import them on the new machine.  This
> too should work, but seems a little more time/effort-intensive.  I don't
> know off-hand how to do that, but I'm sure instructions are out there so
> I'm not worried if it comes to that.

I just did this for a couple of pretty big databases and it went pretty
smoothly.  You know the shortcut I took? Install phpMyAdmin on both
systems and use its import / export facilities. If you have a web server,
and don't have phpMyAdmin running, you're missing a real easy to use
MySQL admin tool.

The only drawback I ran into was the fact that one of the databases was
so huge, phpMyAdmin couldn't load it due to php memory constraints. But
there's a very nice php script called 'bigdump' that easily breaks it up.
This is mentioned in the phpMyAdmin help files.

This way, you have a nice, text file backup of your database, that can
be imported into a variety of SQL databases. And no binary magic is
happening either.

-- 
Jonathan Arnold                       http://www.buddydog.org

Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of
arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather
to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, martini in the other, body
thoroughly used up, worn out and screaming "WOO HOO what a ride!"


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