There are a bunch of scripts on the Internet that overly complicate the issue of automatically backing up your database. Here is a PHP script I wrote to backup a mysql database and email the results. Just set a cron job (/etc/crontab) to run this script with the following command: php dbBackUp.php
You can either copy and paste the code from the post or download a copy. It uses the PEAR Mail and Mail_Mime packages to do a lot of the work, so you'll need those installed before it will cooperate.
