Once in a while you need to do whole database backups. Doing database backups is not possible through phpmyadmin all the times because of:

* Large database. Can be some 20 MB or 40 MB. Cpanel or any other webpanel phpmyadmin will be timed-out with this big database.

* When you need complete backups to restore whole database structure too.

* When you want fast and reliable way.

The following is the telnet commands to backup and restore the databases.

This is the command to use that dumps whole DB to the sql-file:
mysqldump -u <dbuser> -p <dbname> > /path/to/backup.sql

This command restores DB from sql-file created by first command:
mysql -u <dbuser> -p <dbname> < /path/to/backup.sql

Where:
u - is database username
p - is database password
dbname - is the databasename
/path/to/ - is the absolute path to backup.sql file