Importing and Exporting a MySQL database with Drush

These steps are for Drupal 8 and 9.

Export your database

Order here is important.  First you want to clear all the Drupal caches.  Then export / dump the db the sql database to a file in your home directory.

drush cr
drush sql-dump > path/to/your/file/ourpout/sql-dump-file-name.sql

or

drush sql-dump --extra-dump=--no-tablespaces --result-file=../sql/db-2022-12-07.sql

Without having to manually set the date

drush sql-dump --extra-dump=--no-tablespaces --result-file=../sql/db-$(date +%Y-%m-$d).sql

Import Database

Begin by dropping all the tables in your database.  Then with the db empty, import the sql dump back into your Drupal database.

drush sql-drop
drush sql-cli < /path/to/your/file/sql-dump-file-name.sql

or

drush sql-drop
drush sqlc < /path/to/your/file/sql-dump-file-name.sql