The directory where MySQL database files are stored is defined in the MySQL configuration file
my.cnf
or
my.ini
. The actual file names and suffixes depend on which
storage engines[
^] you are using. You should backup the whole MySQL data directory when the database server is stopped, or use the
mysqldump
program to create a snaphot of the database. See:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/backup-and-recovery.html[
^]