Re: Is it possible to retrieve and restore data files from \Program Files\MySQL

[Peter Brawley]

Data locations are settings in my.ini. In the simplest case, all data are in the folder specified by the datadir variable in that file, but it is possible to add other innodb locations with the innodb_data_home_dir variable. For such reasons there is no one-size-fits-all list of possible MySQL data file locations.

An RDBMS isn't just a database file utility. It's constantly active. Generally, the only condition under which a straight file copy generates a reliable backup is where all such locations are known and the database server has been shut down without error. Overall backup approaches are described at https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/backup-types.html.