Exporting Structure and Data - Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management - page 131

On a Linux system, assuming that the web server is running as group apache and the
scripts are owned by user marc , the following commands would do the trick:
# mkdir save_dir
# chown marc.apache save_dir
# chmod g=rwx save_dir
The proper ownership and permissions mask highly depend on the
chosen web server and the SAPI (see http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Server_Application_Programming_Interface ) used,
which influences how directories and files are created and accessed—PHP
could be using the scripts' owner as the accessing user, or the web server's
user/group itself.
We also have to define the './save_dir' directory name in $cfg['SaveDir'] .
We are using a path relative to the phpMyAdmin directory here, but an absolute path
would work just as well.
The Save as file section will appear with a new Save on server section:
After clicking Go , we will get a confirmation message or an error message (if the web
server does not have the required permissions to save the file).
For saving a file again using the same file name, check the Overwrite
existing file(s) box.