moving your mysql tables and data to another serve

Hi, I have massive amounts of data in my mysql databases and now i have to move servers.

Is the best way to tranfer the data, to export it to a text file?

I dont really know.. any help would be great

I've used a straight dump from a server and piped the output into another :

I log into the server that I'd like to populate. Then:

mysqladmin -uLocalMysqlUser create tableName
mysqldump -hOtherHostName -uUser -pPassword tableName | mysql -hlocalhost -uLocalMysqlUser tableName

It's probably far from the "best" method, but it gets the job done. 🙂

If we ever need to move MySQL data from one server to another we normally just export to a text file (mysqldump) and then import it

Its quick easy and dirty 🙂

Works perfectly.

DON'T do this!!

Always let the database server handle the filesystem stuff,
never do it manually.

Use export and import

I have heard that if you export to a text file and you have large amounts of data, you risk corruption...

Is this true?

We export customers databases everyweek and never had any bad data.

Last week I exported 120Mb of data and then imported on another machine without any problems