The following standard options also exist for the mysql command. Full descriptions for these options can be found in the MySQL reference manual, accessible through, e.g., Server Option, System Variable, and Status Variable Reference. These options must be specified ahead of any other mysqlbackup options, including the rest of the standard options:

--print-defaults             Print the program argument list and exit.
--no-defaults                Don't read default options from any option file.
--defaults-file=PATH         Only read default options from the given file. It has to be the first option to be specified, if used. 
--defaults-extra-file=PATH   Read this file after the global files are read.
--defaults-group-suffix=str  Also read option groups with the usual names and a suffix of str.  

The following options are also common between mysqlbackup and mysql, and full descriptions for them can be found in the MySQL reference manual, accessible through, e.g., Server Option, System Variable, and Status Variable Reference. However, mysqlbackup does not accept any short forms for these options as mysql does (for example, you must use --help instead of -h for mysqlbackup):

--help      Display help. 
--version   Display version information
--verbose   Print more verbose information. 
--debug     Print debug information.

More standard options are available for mysqlbackup:

--force       Force operations such as overwrite files, create backup directory.
--trace=level Trace level of messages by mysqlbackup.

--force: By default, some of the operations halt rather than overwrite any user data or log files when told to write to existing files. --force allows the overwriting of InnoDB data and log files during the apply-log and apply-incremental-backup operations and allows the replacing of an image file during an backup-to-image or backup-dir-to-image option. .

--trace=level

Trace level of mysqlbackup messages. The permissible levels, in the order of increasing fineness, are: