Creating a backup of a MariaDB database can be done using the `mysqldump` utility that comes with MariaDB and MySQL.
Here are the steps:
1. Open your terminal.
1. Use the following command to create a backup. Replace `username`, `password`, `database_name` and `backup.sql` with your actual username, password, database name, and the desired name of the backup file.
```
mysqldump -u username -p database_name > backup.sql
```
After you enter the command, you’ll be prompted to enter your password. Type it in and hit enter.
This will create a `.sql` file that contains all the SQL queries needed to recreate your database.
If you want to backup all databases, you can use the `—all-databases` option:
```
mysqldump -u username -p —all-databases > all_backup.sql
```
In case you want to compress the backup on the fly, you can use the `gzip` command like this:
```
mysqldump -u username -p database_name | gzip > backup.sql.gz
```
This is a basic backup and should be sufficient for most use cases. However, for large or highly important databases, you should look into more advanced backup strategies.
