Hi, On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 8:55 PM Kit Rodman via Developers <developers(a)phpmyadmin.net> wrote: I think I should first ask what your intentions are. This question is usually a warning sign that "Whatever you're planning to do, you shouldn't." There are very few reasons why you would need to directly interact with the folder on disk. Backing up should be done through mysqldump or some other special utility, import or export likewise should not be handled by directly manipulating the files on disk. They're in a binary format native to MySQL and you can damage your database by working with the folders or files in this directory. To directly answer, the MySQL data directory is the folder that contains all of your databases (unless you do some advanced configuration to split a database across multiple disks). That folder depends on your operating system and how MySQL was installed. On Linux, it's most commonly in /var/lib/mysql/. I believe the current default path on Windows is C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 8.0\data. You can find the directory out by directly querying MySQL. From any MySQL prompt (such as the SQL tab in phpMyAdmin, or the MySQL command line client) you can use the command SHOW VARIABLES LIKE "datadir"; Or from the phpMyAdmin graphical interface, you can use the "Variables" tab across the top then search the results (you can filter the results so you don't have to scroll). Cheers, Isaac