It is important to maintain backups of your MySQL databases, but unfortunately MySQL server does not have a simple backup function like Microsoft SQL server, and it is important to know that simply backing up the physical files on the server is not a viable solution as this does not allow you to restore individual databases from these files.
To backup MySQL databases you must perform a MySQLDump and EXPORT the data as SQL statements to a file which can then be re-imported in case of disaster. This can be very time consuming for a large database and may take hours.
To do this manually you would use the MySQLDump function, or you can do it via MySQL workbench.
The preferable way is to use a 3rd party tool to automatate and schedule your backups.
We recommend MySQL Backup FTP, which we use ourselves.
This allows you to not only schedule and automate your backups but to also copy the backup to offsite storage via FTP or cloud storage such as google drive.
