Let's say you have a table with many data rows, now you want to create a backup copy of this table of all rows or a subset of them, you can use the "CREATE TABLE ... SELECT" statement. The tutorial script below gives you a good example:
mysql> INSERT INTO tip VALUES (1, 'Learn MySQL',
'Visit www.GlobalGuideLine.com','2006-07-01');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.62 sec)
mysql> CREATE TABLE tipBackup SELECT * FROM tip;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.49 sec)
Records: 1 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0