[Toolserver-l] Backing up a user database

[Marcin Cieslak]

>> River Tarnell <r.tarnell at IEEE.ORG> wrote:
>
>>Are there any subtle options that need to be set on mysqldump to make
>>sure the output is usable in that environment?
>
> In previous versions of MySQL it was necessary to use 'mysqldump 
> --default-character-set=latin1' if you had tables marked as Latin-1 
> which actually contained UTF-8 data.  Otherwise, the dump would be 
> corrupted and unusable.
>

I would check every table with

SHOW TABLE STATUS;

and check its character set (disguised in the Collation column)
and use *that* character set in mysqldump (doing dumps table per table
if necessary). Otherwise you are like to lose some data,
or at least produce a dump that needs to be converted.

Dumping latin1 table as latin1 (even if it contains UTF-8 binary data)
is the way to go (as river say), but dumping utf-8 as latin1 may 
not work as you want. 

It is also a good idea to create another instance and restore tables
from backup and see ho it looks like.

//Saper