Yes this would do exactly what it said i.e. It would delete the table if it already existed. Please remember that you are creating a dump that would be imported (with two scenarios);
if in case of fresh database (or table) creation it make no difference by the drop table statement, because there is no table to drop in the first place.
But to skip deletion of the table already created; use --skip-add-drop-table instead. (Also use --no-create-info with --skip-add-drop-table because you also wouldn't want create table statement as well) i.e.
mysqldump --skip-add-drop-table --no-create-info -h mysqlhostserver -u mysqlusername -p databasename tablename | bzip2 -c > blog.bak.sql.bz2
FYI: You can't export more than one table using (tablename, tablename, tablename). Either you export all tables don't use any tablename after databasename OR
use only one tablename.
Edit
Please note that if your table is huge then its is wise to export it in parts. i.e. create a dumps files of 80k (eighty thousand) records (roughly equal to 10 Mb) using the following command;
FYI:I had split the export using the where to mysqldump.
mysqldump -h mysqlhostserver -u mysqlusername -p --add-drop-table --add-drop-trigger --skip-triggers --dump-date --single-transaction --where='1 limit 0,80000' databasename tablename > /home/blog1.bak.sql
mysqldump mysqlhostserver -u mysqlusername -p --skip-add-drop-table --no-create-info --dump-date --single-transaction --where='1 limit 80000,999999' databasename tablename > /home/blog2.bak.sql
The above command first creates first 80K record file blog1.bak.sql file (note that i had skipped trigger(s) in this dump. I found that later because it had made me crazy that if the first dump had any associated triggers on insert or update. then when you would be importing this first dump file,
- it would create the table
- insert the records in the newly created table.
- create triggers associated with this table and enforced them
So When you would be importing the other dump file after first; it would enforce the triggers (no way to disable triggers for now; except to rewrite those triggers and add complicated code to disable triggers for debuging Or in our case importing). Usually trigger had code with joins to others tables; that might not be imported before this import and thus cause failure to import.