How To Change a MariaDB Data Directory to a New Location on CentOS

1 — Moving the MariaDB Data Directory

To prepare for moving MariaDB’s data directory, let’s verify the current location by starting an interactive session using the administrative credentials.

#mysql -u root -p

When prompted, supply the MariaDB root password. Then from the mysql prompt, select the data directory:

> select @@datadir;

/var/lib/mysql/

This output confirms that MariaDB is configured to use the default data directory, /var/lib/mysql/, so that’s the directory we need to move.

To ensure the integrity of the data, we’ll stop service - MariaDB before we actually make changes to the data directory:

# systemctl stop mariadb

to check if the service is stopped use the command:

#systemctl status mariadb

Sep 11 12:21:04 mysql systemd[1]: Stopped MariaDB database server.

Now that the server is shut down, we’ll copy the existing database directory to the new location with rsync. Using the -a flag preserves the permissions and other directory properties, while-v provides verbose output so you can follow the progress.