Hey guys, I'm about to upgrade my MySQL db from source and I'm looking for ways to back up the old files before I take the plunge of compiling from source. When I upgraded my PHP from 5.2 to 5.3 I was able to look at the ./configure command through info.php. Is there a way for me to retrieve the config params for MySQL as well? Take note my PHP and MySQL's first installs were from RPM (Fedora 10) so most likely they were installed in different directories too with different configs.
You could either take a backup of your MySQL data directory (e.g. /var/lib/mysql), or you create SQL dumps of all databases: http://www.howtoforge.com/faq/6_3_en.html