mysqldump from a remote server with compression

In order to use compression over the wire for a faster transfer, pass the --compress option to mysqldump. Example:

mysqldump -h db.example.com -u username -p --compress dbname > dbname.sql

Important: If you don’t want to lock up the source db, you should also include --lock-tables=false. But you may not get an internally consistent db image that way.

To also save the file compressed, you can pipe to gzip.

mysqldump -h db.example.com -u username -p --compress dbname | gzip --stdout > dbname.sql.gz