How to Сompress a mysqldump Backup Using Gzip

mysqldump is a tool that allows you to perform logical backups for your MySQL databases. The output of mysqldump is a SQL file that can be used later to restore one or more databases.

Gzip can be used togheter with mysqldump in order to compress the size of the output. It has 9 leveles of compression, 6 being the default one.

Let's assume we have a database named

my_app

for which we want to create a dump and compress it using gzip (default level of compression). We can achieve it with the following command:

mysqldump my_app | gzip > my_app_backup.sql.gz

Let's assume we want to backup the same

my_app

database, but this time with a compression level of 8. We can do it with the following command:

mysqldump my_app | gzip -8 > my_app_backup.sql.gz

mysqldump has a lot of flags & functions. Check out mysqldump.guru to find out what else you can do with mysqldump.