MySQL tables on external hard drive

Question

I have a large amount of text data I need to import into MySQL. I'm doing this on a MacBook and don't have enough space for it so I want to store it in an external hard drive (I'm not really concerned about speed at this point - this is just for testing).

What's the best way to do it?

• Install MySQL on the external hard drive (is this possible on a Mac?)
• Install MySQL on the laptop's hard drive and have the tables on the external (how?)

Answer 1

One simple hack is to create an symbolic link replacing your current mysql database file location pointing to the external disk. Google symbolic link.

sample usage would be after you shutdown mysql, change the old mysql db folder name to something else, and create the symbolic link using the ln command like below

ln -s [EXTERNAL DRIVE PATH] [MYSQL DB FOLDER PATH]

Then move all the previous content of the mysql db folder to the new location.

Answer 2

Open /etc/mysql/my.cnf and find the value of the datadir. Alternatively, you can find this out in the mysql monitor with

mysql>   select @@datadir;

Stop mysql

sudo systemctl stop mysql

Copy the data from there to your external drive

sudo rsync -av /var/lib/mysql /mnt/myHDD/somedir/mysql

Modify the location of the datadir in my.cnf.
Start mysql again

sudo systemctl start mysql

Verify that everything is still fine and remove the original data dir.

This page contains a more extensive guide but all the additional issues it warns about were not relevant for me on my raspberry PI. I.e. I skipped them and it worked.