Exporting Structure and Data - Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.8 for Effective MySQL Management - page 123

A special directory has to be created on the web server before saving an export file
on it. Usually this is a subdirectory of the main phpMyAdmin directory. We will use
save_dir as an example. This directory must have special permissions. First, the
web server must have write permissions for this directory. Also, if the web server's
PHP component is running in safe mode, the owner of the phpMyAdmin scripts
must be the same as the owner of save_dir .
On a Linux system, assuming that the web server is running as user 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
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.
User-specific Save Directories
We can use the special string, %u , in the $cfg['SaveDir'] parameter. This string
will be replaced by the logged-in user name. For example, using:
$cfg['SaveDir'] = './save_dir/%u';
would give us the on-screen choice Save on server in ./save_dir/marc/ directory .