10. Setting Up a Test Database
While we’re logged in to PHPMyAdmin (or MySQL Workbench, or whichever tool you’re using), we’re going to create a database and populate it with a table containing a couple of records.
Since I won’t know in advance which toolset you’re using, I won’t put detailed instructions here. Instead, I’ll just say that I chose to call my database, “demo”, my table “demotable” and in this I created two fields, “demokey”, which was an auto-incrementing primary key, and “demotext” which was a simple text field. You do you.
Next, we need to populate this table with some actual data. It’s important that we create at least two records. Seeing as we’ve created simple text fields, you should be able to just enter text such as
This is the first test record
This is the second test record
We’re going to use this table to test our backup process. It’s not a bad idea to use PHPMyAdmin’s “Browse” feature to view the records and make sure the text is clearly visible in each record.
Once you’ve confirmed that the records have been created (with PHPMyAdmin you can just use the “Browse” tab, which should be the left-most one once you’ve selected the table via the left gutter menu). If all is well, we can proceed to taking a backup of this database…