What is mysqldump? is a tool that allows you to perform logical backups for your MySQL databases. The output of mysqldump is a SQL file that can be used later to restore one or more databases. mysqldump How to compress a mysqldump backup using Gzip? in order to compress the size of the output. It has 9 leveles of compression, 6 being the default one. Gzip can be used togheter with mysqldump Let's assume we have a database named for which we want to create a dump and compress it using gzip (default level of compression). We can achieve it with the following command: my_app mysqldump my_app | gzip > my_app_backup.sql.gz How to specify the compression level? Let's assume we want to backup the same database, but this time with a compression level of 8. We can do it with the following command: my_app mysqldump my_app | gzip -8 > my_app_backup.sql.gz What else can be done using mysqldump? mysqldump has a lot of flags & functions. Check out mysqldump.guru to find out what else you can do with mysqldump. Previously published at https://medium.com/@adidragocea/how-to-compress-a-mysqldump-backup-using-gzip-5dc2a240e9a7