After reading your story on  Copying MySQL databases,  I would like to know whether a MySQL database can be copied from one machine to another using the mysqldump command instead of taking a snapshot by copying the data directory.

The mysqldump command can be used to export MySQL database data for one database at a time or for all MySQL data.

According to the documentation, you should consider using the mysqlhotcopy instead if you are backing up a server. Unfortunately, mysqlhotcopy might not work very well on Windows systems, and it can only be run on the system that has the database directories.

The mysqldump command uses a syntax that looks like

mysqldump [options] db_name [tables]

 where entire databases will be dumped if you do not name any tables. You can replace the db_name and tables list with "-all-databases" to dump everything.

 For MySQL versions prior to 4.1, include the -opt option in your command; otherwise, the entire result set gets loaded into memory before anything is dumped.

Loading your dumped data into another MySQL system can be done by using the "mysqlimport" command.