mysqldump

Needless to say you have to backup up MySQL database just like any other rdbms. The utility to
backup a MySQL database is mysqldump. 

mysqldump -u [username] -p [database_name] > /backup/db_name.sql

The above command will dump the contents of database into an ASCII file. To restore the
database you can run this file against a database:

mysql -u [username] -p [database_name] < /backup/db_name.sql