It is very important to take the back-up of your data as well as the application to keep things moving and to be on the safer side. It is wiser to take the back-up of data and structure both. There are several ways to take the back-up.

If you are using phpMyAdmin then you it very easy to take the back-up. Simply select SugarCRM database and then export that database. Now it will show you all the tables within and the options to save that file. Select all the files and then check the radio button to take the dump as SQL, LaTeX or CSV. If this is the first time you are taking the back-up then I would prefer to take the Data and Structure individually meaning there will be two SQL files created at the end, one which will be having the structure of table and the another one which will be having the data. It is wiser to take the back-up of data as it changes every time and the structure remains the same most of the time.

The other method of taking the back-up is through the command prompt. In the Linux (DOS on Windows) go to the mysql/bin folder and run these commands:

mysqldump -u USERNAME -pPASSWORD DATABASE-NAME dump.sql

Replace the USER, PASSWORD and DATABASE-NAME with your MySQL settings respectively. This command will take the dump of structure and data both. To take the individual run these commands:

mysqldump -u USERNAME -pPASSWORD -t DATABASE-NAME dump.sql

This command will give you the dump of data only(no structure).

mysqldump -u USERNAME -pPASSWORD -d DATABASE-NAME dump.sql

Put the greater than sign between DATABASE-NAME and dump.sql

This command will give you the dump of structure only(no data).

Running these commands will create the dump.sql files in the same directory where you are present. In this case, these files can be found at mysql/bin directory.