When I broke MariaDB, it was no longer feasible to start it, (to the degree that it could have taken days of tinkering), With MariaDB verified to be not running, I tarred the directory /var/lib/mysql/mywiki/ into a file mywiki_with_new_data.tar.
I reinstalled MariaDB thoroughly to force the creation of a new /var/lib/mysql/ and /etc/mysql/ .
As Reindl Harald pointed out you can't do this with InnoDB since it has the 'ibdata' table namespace file. Afaik the only engine you can move/recreate table this way (binary) is MyISAM (and if I'm not wrong also Aria) all other engines more or less have some sort of namespace implementation and it's not possibly to move a single database/table to a different server just by copying the table files. p.s. I share similar opinions about the "innodb_file_per_table" not being enough and especially that in some cases the namespace file tends to grow beyond reason and there is no way to shrink/compact it other than a full data dump / deleting it and reimporting in a clean instance. rr