easy backup of many MySQL databases and tables

What?
At work we have a lot of databases and tables in them that we must have fresh backups on. Until now i used mysqldump to dump ALL databases
and tables into one dumpfile. The size of that file is 1.8GB and growing. Fetching a table to be restored is a tedious task.

The stuff
The solution to the problem is a simple bash script that first checks what databases exist and then in a loop use mysqldump to dump all the tables into
separate date/timestamped files. Finally we gzip the files to save space.
The script could easely be modified to backup an remote MySQL installation.

#!/bin/bash

mkdir $(date +%Y%m%d)
cd $(date +%Y%m%d)
DBS=`/database/mysql/bin/mysql -uTHEUSER -pTHEPASSWORD  -e"show databases"`
for b in $DBS ;
do
  echo Database $b
  TAB=`/database/mysql/bin/mysql -uTHEUSER -pTHEPASSWORD -e"show tables from $b"`
  for t in $TAB ;
  do
    /database/mysql/bin/mysqldump -uTHEUSER -pTHEPASSWORD -e -v -f -q -Q -K $b $t >  $b\_\_$t\__$(date +%Y%m%d_%T)_mysql
  done
done
gzip -9 *_mysql
cd ..