If you are using MySQL 3.23 or later, you can copy the .frm, .MYI, and .MYD files for MyISAM tables between different architectures that support the same floating-point format. (MySQL takes care of any byte-swapping issues.) See Section 13.1, “The MyISAM Storage Engine”.

The MySQL ISAM data and index files (.ISD and *.ISM, respectively) are dependent upon the architecture and, in some cases, the operating system. If you want to move applications to another machine having a different architecture or operating system than that of the current machine, you should not try to move a database by simply copying the files to the other machine. Use mysqldump instead.

By default, mysqldump creates a file containing SQL statements. You can then transfer the file to the other machine and use it as input to the mysql client.

Try mysqldump --help to see what options are available. Before MySQL 4.1, if you are moving the data to a newer version of MySQL, you should add the --opt option to the mysqldump commands shown here, to take advantage of any optimizations that result in a dump file that is smaller and can be processed faster. (--opt is enabled by default as of MySQL 4.1.)

The easiest (although not the fastest) way to move a database between two machines is to run the following commands on the machine on which the database is located:

shell> mysqladmin -h 'other_hostname' create db_name
shell> mysqldump db_name | mysql -h 'other_hostname' db_name

If you want to copy a database from a remote machine over a slow network, you can use these commands:

shell> mysqladmin create db_name
shell> mysqldump -h 'other_hostname' --compress db_name | mysql db_name

You can also store the dump in a file, transfer the file to the target machine, and then load the file into the database there. For example, you can dump a database to a compressed file on the source machine like this:

shell> mysqldump --quick db_name | gzip > db_name.gz

Transfer the file containing the database contents to the target machine and run these commands there:

shell> mysqladmin create db_name
shell> gunzip < db_name.gz | mysql db_name

You can also use mysqldump and mysqlimport to transfer the database. For very large tables, this is much faster than simply using mysqldump. In the following commands, DUMPDIR represents the full path name of the directory you use to store the output from mysqldump.

First, create the directory for the output files and dump the database:

shell> mkdir DUMPDIR
shell> mysqldump --tab=DUMPDIR db_name

Then transfer the files in the DUMPDIR directory to a directory on the target machine and load the files into MySQL there:

shell> mysqladmin create db_name           # create database
shell> cat DUMPDIR/*.sql | mysql db_name   # create tables in database
shell> mysqlimport db_name DUMPDIR/*.txt   # load data into tables

Do not forget to copy the mysql database because that is where the user, db, and host grant tables are stored. You might have to run commands as the MySQL root user on the new machine until you have the mysql database in place.

After you import the mysql database on the new machine, execute mysqladmin flush-privileges so that the server reloads the grant table information.