While there seems to be a tremendous amount of information on MYSQL and backing up databases as well as restoring them, I ran into some challenges and had to follow the steps below to mirror a database.
My goal was to simply have the ability to backup my database while going through some testing. I also wanted to verify that once I had a working "development" environment that I could export/import into a new "production" environment. While mysqldump should accomodate this request possibly in one simple command, I had issues and ended up using mysqldump to export and the "source" command to populate a new database.
# mysqldump -u user_name -p database_name > database_bkup_file_name.sql
Note: Adding the '-p' will cause mysqldump to prompt for the password for the user that you stated in "user_name".
You should theoretically then be able to use mysqldump to then populate a database as follows:
# mysqldump -u user_name -p database_name < database_bkup_file_name.sql
Based on some challenges and a desire to move forward and not necessarily become a MySQL admin, I simply created a new database, added the proper user & permissions followed by:
mysql> use new_database_name;
mysql> source name_of_database_backup_file.sql;
It should have been obvious that the new database was being populated but if you desire to verify, you can simply view the tables.
While this proved handy, it does not allow you to update a database. I will be making some incremental changes to a "dev" environment and will want to update the "prod" environment. In order to accomplish this, I will need to drop the "prod" database and then recreate it and populate it with data. I can see how learning to properly use the mysqlimport command may be the better answer.