Barry L. Kline wrote: > Ray Leventhal wrote: > > | Where does mysql actually store databases and tables in the filesystem? > > If you're asking because you're concerned about backup/restore then > you'll want to forget about the location of the data files and instead > use the mysqldump command to make your backups. > > If you're interested from the capacity planning standpoint then the > answer is that CentOS configures MySQL to live in the /var/lib/mysql > directory. > > Barry Thanks to all who replied. My reason for wanting to know the location of the actual databases and tables is that I had a crash and rebuilt a new system. I hadn't done mysqldump(s) of the databases recently enough to the crash to be useful, so I am going to temporarily mount the drive that contained /var from the old system (thankfully, that partition is sound) and just pull that data out. /var/lib/mysql is the answer I needed. I've since implemented a backup strategy which I found online [1]. The only difference between what I am running and the posted script is the location of the mysqldump file. In the example it's in /usr/local/bin, in Cent it's in /usr/bin Kind regards, -Ray [1] http://www.tech-recipes.com/mysql_tips221.html